I. QUESTIONS OF ASCENDANCY AND DEMISE

Phanariots were an Ottoman Christian elite which, despite structural impediments, imperial ideology, and religious doctrine that would preclude their participation in Ottoman governance, ascended to power in multiple political arenas between the 1660s and 1821. Their rise came about just as the larger imperium was undergoing profound military and political crises precipitated by both internal threats and periodic invasions by the Russian and Habsburg Empires. While some Phanariots were stalwart servants of the sultan, others exacerbated these crises, allying with Russian officials and planning a secessionist uprising that would later unfold into the Greek War of Independence. Their ascendancy, however, is an Ottoman story—a specific outcome of Ottoman responses to the dilemmas of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹

There is no single existing framework in which to adequately situate this Phanariot ascendancy. This is in part because the vicissitudes of Ottoman governance at the turn of the nineteenth century have been swept away by the two competing and intertwined historiographies of modernization and nationalism, historiographies that grew out of the very changes that ultimately buried this elite. According to the core Ottoman narrative of military and administrative modernization, the turn of the nineteenth century is a crucial, if underexplored juncture “between old and new.”Footnote ² Stanford Shaw characterized the “old” Ottoman Empire of the eighteenth century as a “complicated series of overlapping and intertwined classes, institutions, and organizations.”Footnote ³ The “new” nineteenth century incarnation of Ottoman governance revolved around the Tanzimat reform program, first promulgated in 1839. Major goals of these reforms were not only the centralization of political power but also the transformation of Ottoman subjects into an Ottoman citizenry and the concomitant integration of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Ottoman citizens into one supranational political community.

The Tanzimat as an integrationist project was also a response to the “key dilemma of modern empires,” which, according to Dominic Lieven, was one of “how to square the demands of power, which required a state of continental scale, with the challenge presented by ethnic nationalism.”Footnote ⁴ Phanariots were instrumental in presenting the challenge of ethnic nationalism. In Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Serbian national historiographies, Phanariots are depicted as enlightened oriental despots who operated an “empire within an empire” and sponsored a Greek cultural revival that led to a “national awakening.” In this context, they spearheaded the process not of integration but separation from Ottoman governance along ethnic, national lines.Footnote ⁵

Phanariots in their Ottoman milieu remain enigmatic for us today because they ascended to power in an imperial world in crisis, across what would become national boundaries just at the moment when such boundaries were beginning to be imagined. Historians have treated Phanariots as a subversive proto-nationalist faction or a cluster of elite families that were incidental to Ottoman state and society. This suits the exigencies of both imperial modernization and national movements. Their Ottoman ascendancy thus offers us a new vista onto the workings of a multi-confessional empire in the midst of profound transformations, just before a policy of comprehensive legal-administrative “modernizing” reforms—and national movements for secession—took shape. They were taking part in a positive process, not just inhabiting a pause “between old and new.”

I argue here that many Phanariots were part of a community on the verge of integration into the larger system of Ottoman governance. Those Phanariots of the integrationist variety grew into the structures and practices of Ottoman governance in the second half of the eighteenth century. This Phanariot ascendancy was a phenomenon with implications beyond the Danubian Principalities they administered and the Orthodox Christian millet to which they belonged, and for Ottoman foreign relations and domestic imperial governance. Such a process of integration stood in contrast to, for instance, Russian Empress Catherine's policy of toleration, which some scholars argue fostered the integration of particular Muslim institutions and subject groups into the Russian (Orthodox Christian) imperial project in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶ It also stood in contrast to the subsequent, and much better studied Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Both Catherine's reforms and the Ottoman Tanzimat constituted deliberate, if only partially successful, integrationist projects for Russian and Ottoman governance, respectively.

The process of integration, of which Phanariots were both the products and agents, was inadvertent in that individuals, groups, and institutions were growing increasingly dependent on each other without the aid of an explicit ideology of political integration espoused from the central state.Footnote ⁷ Instead, in response to the exigencies of the time, Phanariots were becoming more and more indispensable to crucial operations of Ottoman governance, including foreign relations with European states, food provisioning for the capital city, provincial governance of strategic regions, and military operations by land and sea. Such processes demonstrate the extent to which new communities could develop in multi-confessional empires separately from—and at times even simultaneously with—ideologies of both integration and separation.

In the following discussion I trace this inadvertent integration in a number of ways. After briefly defining the offices and tasks of governance involved in the Phanariot ascendancy, I consider that ascendancy through the lens of the Ottoman central state in order to show the profound ambivalence and lack of a consistent state policy toward this rising elite. I then demonstrate through the symbolism and iconography of the investiture ceremony for Phanariot princes that even if the sultan and his inner circle were unable to articulate a formal policy for or against Phanariot integration, they took part in the performance of idealized relationships between particular Phanariots and several groups involved in Ottoman governance. Third, I turn to the social and ethno-linguistic composition of Phanariot retinues, and go on to consider several points of contact between members of these retinues and larger Ottoman patronage networks. Fourth, I offer a series of comparisons that shed light on the nature of Phanariot integration into Ottoman governance.

The topic of Phanariots in Ottoman governance demands a comparative approach, since it is a story of elite formation that was a byproduct of larger processes of imperial governance. The combination of sources I employ—Ottoman state documents about Phanariots, Ottoman state documents generated by Phanariots, and a Greek-language source published by a Phanariot—reflects such a comparative approach. The last of these sources is Dionysios Photeinos’ three-volume History of the Former Dacia, published in Vienna in 1818 and 1819.Footnote ⁸ Not only does it provide exhaustive details of life and politics from the perspective of a Phanariot functionary, but it was published at the moment of highest ascendancy for this elite. This was only months before the outbreak of Greek secessionist rebellions that tore apart the fundaments of Phanariot networks in Ottoman governance and led to the establishment of the Greek Kingdom in the early 1830s. For this reason I consider its audience, its social and political context, and perspectives that emerge from a close reading of the text. This work in dialogue with a series of Ottoman state documents constitutes the core case study that I then go on to compare to cases of other contemporary, Muslim elites within the Ottoman Empire and in the rival-neighbor multi-confessional Russian Empire.

II. THE OFFICIAL STORY

Phanariots as a group are as difficult to define now as they were in their own time, lacking as we still do a lexicon for groups that fall between national and imperial structures. Their ascendancy began in the late seventeenth century and lasted until the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821. The term “Phanariot” refers to the quarter in Istanbul—Phanar (T. Fener; Gr. Phanari)—where the Orthodox Patriarchate was and is located, and the area where Phanariots had their residences and therefore base of power, as they dominated the lay and sometimes clerical offices of that institution.Footnote ⁹ Situating the neighborhood that was their power base in Istanbul encapsulates the story of the Phanariot rise: Phanar was conveniently located near the many docks of the Golden Horn where crucial provisions arrived in the capital. It was a short boat ride from Topkapı Palace, the seat of the sultanate, and an even shorter one across the bay to Kasımpaşa, where the imperial shipyards and arsenal were located. Phanariots derived their power out of the operations going on at all of these sites: from their commercial activities and emergence as local elites in the seventeenth century, their accumulated knowledge of medicine and European languages useful to the Ottoman imperial project, and their political relationships to and offices in the Orthodox Church, which had special authority over dispersed Christian populations in the Empire. In the course of the eighteenth century they branched out into several sectors of Ottoman governance by attaining the four select positions of imperial dragoman, dragoman of the fleet, voyvoda of Wallachia, and voyvoda of Moldavia. The latter provinces were together known as the Danubian, or Twin Principalities, and bordered both the Austrian and Russian Empires, composing much of present-day Romania.Footnote ¹⁰

These four supreme positions of dragoman and voyvoda served as the prongs of Phanariot networks as they spread into multiple areas of Ottoman governance. The two voyvodas of Moldavia and Wallachia managed tax collection, provincial administration (including church administration of the many lucrative monasteries), policing the imperial boundaries with Russia and Austria, and foreign relations conducted at the border.Footnote ¹¹ From the mid-eighteenth century the voyvodas of these two provinces also had special agreements with the sultan to provide ever more grain and meat for the imperial capital and, in times of war, for the Ottoman military.Footnote ¹²

The dragoman of the court was the liaison between European envoys and the sultan and his inner circle, as well as between the Orthodox Patriarch (and his lucrative empire-wide ecclesiastical administration) and the Court.Footnote ¹³ The dragoman of the fleet, the final office to be created and granted to Phanariots was second in command to the kapudan pasha (Ottoman admiral) and was de facto the administrator of many Aegean islands and Anatolian coastal localities. He was also responsible for naval operations that included shipbuilding and warfare. Finally, there were several other dragoman positions that were of strategic importance but were not as formalized as that of the divan and the fleet. These included the dragoman of the imperial army (tercüman-ı ordu-yu Hümayun)Footnote ¹⁴ and dragoman of the Morea (mora tercümanı).Footnote ¹⁵ Both positions further integrated Phanariot networks into the larger arena of Ottoman governance.

Let us turn to the social composition of the Phanariot retinues. Within our own terminology we might refer to Phanariots as transnational, but this was an age before nation-states. At the top echelons of the Phanariot network, as in the official bureaucracy of the Orthodox Church, Greek was the dominant language, and yet it would be inaccurate at best to call them Greek “nationals.” Christians of several linguistic groups were brought into the Phanariot fold, including those raised as speakers of Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian, and Armenian.Footnote ¹⁶ In order to be translators, proficiency was required in European languages (usually Italian and French) in addition to the elsine-i selase, or the Three Languages—Arabic, Persian, and Turkish—that constituted Ottoman Turkish.Footnote ¹⁷ Phanariots operated out of Istanbul, and across what we now call the Balkans, as well as the Aegean islands, much of Anatolia, and even between the trade entrepôts and churches and monasteries of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. The “Twin” Danubian Principalities were their major provincial power base. There, as tax farmer-governors, they co-opted, and married into the local Romanian-speaking class of boyar landowners and supplied the Ottoman military and its capital of Istanbul with crucial food provisions. Given these interlinked patronage networks, there were few degrees of separation between monks on Mt. Sinai, merchants in Anatolia, diplomats in Istanbul, soldiers on the Danube, sailors in the Aegean islands, administrators at the imperial arsenal and mint, and scribes in Bucharest.Footnote ¹⁸ Parts of these networks could be mobilized for an exceptionally wide range of pursuits, whether for personal profit or state gain, the distinction between which grew increasingly fuzzy.Footnote ¹⁹

The period of Phanariot ascendancy (1660s–1821) is one of the least understood eras with respect to the Ottoman Empire as a whole. Of all the tumultuous periods in the long history of the Empire, among the most troubled was that from the 1770s through the 1820s, when the Phanariot ascendancy was most intense. It brought a transformation in fundamental political relationships both within Ottoman governance and between the Ottoman Empire and emergent European and Eurasian empires. In the Danubian Principalities alone, three protracted wars took place between 1770 and 1821, and the Napoleonic Wars were taking place just outside Ottoman domains and across the Mediterranean in Ottoman Egypt. Challenges and opportunities were also presented by equally protracted conflicts between rebel ayan Osman Pasvantoğlu of Vidin, just south of the Wallachian border (the Danube River), ongoing raids of Kırcali brigands in the Rhodope mountains that throughout the 1790s interrupted trade and cut off provisioning routes between the Principalities and Istanbul, and the first and second Serbian uprisings (1804–1813, and 1815).

Indeed, the turbulent reign of Sultan Selim III was the nadir of the old Ottoman regime and the dawn of an age of state renewal experiments—the long nineteenth century. For the purposes of this discussion, the state of constant flux means that there was no “normal” state of affairs for Phanariot networks. The interruptions to trade, administration, and virtually all other sectors of governance could and did include famine, plague, fires, and earthquakes. With each new conflict, large numbers of civilians fled the cities or affected rural areas to wait it out, while Phanariot grandees would choose their side, either gaining employment under the Russian administration of the Principalities or moving back to Istanbul to serve as translators in the Ottoman army or for a hiatus in their Phanar villas.Footnote ²⁰ Each disruption to the system seemed to present opportunities for individual advancement as well as new niches for Phanariots as a group. We see this on an individual level in the life story of Dionysios Photeinos, the Phanariot functionary and historian whose work we examine below. Photeinos was typical in that he fled the Principalities with his patron in the heat of conflict with Russia there in 1808, only to settle there again after the cessation of hostilities and the reinstitution of Ottoman-sponsored administration with a higher office and presumably a reconstituted patronage network.

The greatest disruptions, between 1806 and 1812, led to the greatest restoration and indeed the golden age of Phanariot networks, from 1812 until the outbreak of Romanian (Tudor Vladimirescu's) and Greek rebellions in 1821. By 1812 peace with Russia had been achieved with the Treaty of Bucharest,Footnote ²¹ Mahmud II had taken over the sultanate after the execution of his predecessors Selim III and Mustafa IV in 1808, and the Phanariot administration of the Principalities resumed. The Russian and Ottoman sovereigns agreed to seven-year terms for voyvodas and other regulations. Many Muslim-Ottoman supporters of the New Order reforms were back in office, thus creating an atmosphere amenable to Phanariot advancement. Many reform supporters had been in the newly formed diplomatic corps, and so had ties of schooling and patronage with Phanariot grandees going back twenty years and more.

III. THE PHANARIOT ASCENDANCY THROUGH THE LENS OF THE CENTRAL STATE

The intimate link between the rising fortunes of Phanariots and the waves of crisis in the broader system of Ottoman governance begs the question of how Phanariots were seen by the sultan and his inner circle of advisors that made up the central state. That there is no “Phanariot dossier” sitting in the Ottoman state archives indicates the lack of systematic consideration that Phanariots received from their Ottoman superiors. We know that early Phanariot pioneers such as Alexander Mavrocordatos, appointed minister of the secrets (ex aporriton) in the wake of his successful performance at the Treaty of Carlowitz, were the confidantes of earlier sultans. But by the reign of Sultan Selim III (1789–1808), the latter had developed a deeply conflicting stance toward what he called the “Phanariot clique” (Fenarlı takımı).

In one undated memo written by Sultan Selim to his grand vizier sometime between 1800 and 1807, the sultan condemns the Phanariot clique for “pursuing their own aims and spreading false rumors.” He asks his grand vizier, “Why can't you and your servants take notice and try to put a stop to this?” and wonders, “Can't anything have an effect on these infidels?” (Bu kafirlere hiç bir şey tesir etmez mi?). He goes on to say that this is what can be expected of this Wallachia and Moldavia set (Böyle şeyler Eflak ve Boğdan takımından çıkar), ordering the vizier to kill those involved in the conspiracy to “open the eyes” of the others (gözlerini açsunlar sonra kenduleri bilur).Footnote ²²

Despite the sense of powerlessness and frustration evident in the sultan's memo, a draft of an irade from the same period (h. 1216; m. 1801–1802) declares that appointments to Ottoman embassies in EuropeFootnote ²³ will be made from among the “princes, sons of princes, boyars, and sons of boyars” (beyzadeler ve beyzadeler oğulları ve boyarlar ve boyar evladlarına), all of whom were part of the existing Wallachia and Moldavia service.Footnote ²⁴ While appointments to European embassies were never made from Phanariot princes and boyars exclusively, they did constitute an important contingent of the diplomatic service under Selim III. The memo outlines specific rules to be put in place that would weave these Phanariots into the existing bureaucracy, for instance, their terms of office, how their previous ranks and salaries as dragoman or voyvoda would affect their status when their terms as ambassadors ended, and who they would be allowed to take with them for staff (including wives and other family members).Footnote ²⁵

A third document comes from a slightly later period (h. 1225; m. 1810–1811), just after Sultan Mahmud II took power in the wake of his predecessors Selim III's and Mustafa IV's executions at the hands of janissaries. It is not a formal document, but rather the scrawl of a high state official trying to pin down which Phanariot families were allied with which foreign powers, and indeed which family members were holding which high office at that moment. It reads, for instance, “They accuse the following of being Russian-aligned: Moruz Aleksandir Bey—four-time voyvoda; called French-aligned: Suçu [=Soutos] Aleko Bey, currently voyvoda of Wallachia; they accuse the following of being Russian-aligned: Moruz Bey's second brother Dimitraşko, today the dragoman of the imperial army.”Footnote ²⁶

Phanariots, whose allegiances were apparently unclear to their Ottoman superiors, were nevertheless regularly submitting dispatches in Ottoman Turkish to the highest of state functionaries. In these they relayed the goings-on of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars just over their borders, or advised on matters of diplomacy and proper state etiquette toward foreign powers.Footnote ²⁷ From the perspective of the official documents they generated that made it into the Ottoman archives, Phanariots were suppliers of necessary, strategic intelligence to an Ottoman state that was itself becoming increasingly enmeshed in intra-imperial continental politics. But the documents produced by officials of the central state portray a far more ambivalent Phanariot role in the project of imperial governance. On the level of explicit ideology, their Ottoman superiors seemed unable to fully accommodate Phanariots as a group (takım; ta'ife) even as the points of engagement between Phanariots and the matrix of Ottoman governance proliferated.

IV. PERFORMING OTTOMAN GOVERNANCE

A vivid entre into the interconnections between Phanariots and this matrix is their investiture ceremony,Footnote ²⁸ one that would have warmed the hearts of both the Emperor Justinian and Eric Hobsbawm. The ceremony was held for Phanariot voyvodas, or princes, leaving Istanbul for their provincial seats of power in Bucharest and Jassy (now called Iaşi). The two voyvoda positions were the crowning glory of the Phanariot network. Like the offices of grand dragoman and dragoman of the fleet, they were of near royal status.Footnote ²⁹ But while the dragomans enjoyed physical proximity to the sultan and his inner circle, the voyvodas enjoyed free reign in setting taxes and eventually in setting up a civil code in their respective provinces. They thus could deem themselves autonomous Christian rulers, even if under the authority of the sultan.

The Danubian Principalities were dubbed by Nicolae Iorga “Byzance après Byzance,” implying that they were a holdover of Christian imperial power. But as is apparent from the elaborate investiture ceremony, Byzantine iconography was not ossified but quite thoroughly integrated into and tailored to the Ottoman political context. Ritualized acts symbolizing affiliation, submission, and sovereignty were performed at several places in Istanbul, on the road to the provincial capital, and at significant sites in and around Bucharest or Jassy. They linked the many groups and locations within Phanariot networks, but also those networks and the many larger ones of Ottoman governance.

The sequence of ritual events reveals the many sites and actors that melded Phanariot networks with the larger matrix of Ottoman governance.Footnote ³⁰ The Istanbul portion of the ceremony began with a ritualized invitation ceremony to summon the initiate and transport him by water along the Golden Horn from his Phanar residence to the grand vizier's quarters near Topkapı Palace.Footnote ³¹ At this point the initiate would already have selected his cabinet, the retinue of twelve or more officials who would follow him to his post and man his upper administration. Together they would meet with the grand vizier and secure his official appointment in preparation for the investiture ceremony the following day. On the way back to his Phanar residence the initiate and his now sizable procession, including Ottoman military figures, a military marching band, and his own retinue, would stop for a benediction ceremony at the Patriarchate complex, also in the Phanar district, during which the Patriarch and the members of his Holy Synod would approve the voyvoda's appointment.Footnote ³²

The investiture ceremony continued the next day at Topkapı Palace, took several hours and included a ritualized meal. Accepting the sultan's food had since the gazi days been an Ottoman sign of loyalty to the sultan, which is why, when the janissaries rebelled, they banged pots, and why the Topkapı Palace was designed so that the smoke from the chimneys, giving visual form to the fact that so many people in the palace were accepting the sultan's food, could be seen from far away. In the Phanariot ceremony a special soup was shared with representatives of the Janissary Corps (Ottoman infantry) in the palace's outer courtyard. The symbolism of sharing this meal was manifold. Not only would Phanariots be responsible for feeding the janissaries that went on campaign, but also, it seems, for working with those that doubled as merchants in the peacetime state-administered grain trade from the Principalities to Istanbul via the ports of the Danube and Black Sea.Footnote ³³ Cooperation was signified by the act of sharing a meal—janissaries formed ocaks, or units, that cooked and ate together—and in this way the Phanariot initiate was being inducted into that community as well. This portion of the ceremony even included the initiate being shown the esame defteri, or pay register of the janissaries, and “giving assent” to it.Footnote ³⁴

The core moment of the ceremony was the encounter with the sultan, which was carefully staged and similar in many ways to audiences that foreign ambassadors would have with the Ottoman sovereign. This demonstrated the dual nature of Phanariot voyvodas as both autonomous rulers and administrator-subjects of the sultan. Such a similarity made sense in that Phanariot voyvodas were deemed autonomous rulers and thus came under the authority of the chief scribe, or foreign minister, rather than the Kahya Bey, or interior minister. A document, known as a telhis, would be delivered to the sultan asking for an audience, and the sultan would sign off, allowing the initiate to be escorted in.Footnote ³⁵ The sultan would vest the voyvoda with the kaftan and kuka hat that symbolized his office and recite a pact to which the initiate would agree: “The arrangement demanded of you from my imperial pantries [coffers] is this: you bring back news from the European parts; the voyvodaship of Wallachia is granted to you with full autonomy, immunity, and plenipotentiary powers: in return your loyalty is demanded.”Footnote ³⁶

The very apex of the Phanariot network, then, was held in place by a contractual relationship to the person of the sultan: the voyvoda was to supply information from Europe and remain loyal to the sultan, while being allowed the freedom—that is, the autonomy and immunity—to rule his Principality as he pleased. In practice this meant that he was to maintain a many-tiered relationship to the merchants, soldiers, and officials of the Ottoman system.

The initiate would then travel once again back to his residence in the Phanar and assemble his Princely Council, making the preparations for a journey of several weeks or more, depending on the weather conditions, to Bucharest or Jassy. After completing these preparations he would set off with a procession of hundreds and be cheered by hundreds more as he departed the capital and went on to make ritualized rest stops at particular villages and towns along the way. This was a peacetime mimicry of the many military campaigns (replete with military marching music for the duration) that had not long before traversed the same lands to fight ayan, Russians, or Austrians.

When the new Wallachian voyvoda's procession neared Bucharest it would stop at the Vacaresti Monastery on the city's outskirts, assemble, and prepare for the entrance into the city and the arrival at the voyvoda's court that adjoined the city's cathedral.Footnote ³⁷ While the church was a minor presence in the Istanbul portion of the ceremony, it took center stage in the provincial portion, with the monastery and cathedral acting as pivotal sites, tolling church bells replacing the Ottoman military music, and the Archbishop maintaining continuity between voyvodas and greeting the new initiate upon his arrival in the city. The voyvoda would greet representatives of the various local social strata and his cabinet, and hold a reception at his new palace replete with coffee, sweets, and hookah pipe.Footnote ³⁸ His wife, whose title was domna, held a reception in her salon for the ladies of the retinue. Thus a ceremony that had begun in the sultan's chamber in Istanbul was ended in the voyvoda's personal court in Bucharest. In the final act, the new voyvoda vested his new officials with kaftans, mimicking his own investiture with the kaftan and kuka hat by the sultan.Footnote ³⁹

V. WAR AND PEACE IN THE LIFE OF A PHANARIOT

Historian-political scientist Paschalis Kitromilides has integrated social and intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Balkans, and in so doing has gone the furthest toward contextualizing the Phanariot ascendancy. He probes the world of southeastern Europe, which he says was “not yet national” but was Orthodox Christian, with Greek language enjoying primacy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Kitromilides’ purpose is to explore the “Southeast European Enlightenment,” and he does so by focusing on the region's intellectual and ecclesiastical history. Within this framework, he quotes from a contemporary source that condemns Phanariots and their Wallachian boyar partners, and says they were merely “imitat[ing] the customs of the Ottomans and behaving like ‘European Turks’ in their daily life.”Footnote ⁴¹ From the perspective of the Southeast European Enlightenment this comment seems clearly pejorative, given that the Ottoman context is treated as a political and cultural void. But from another vantage, that of Ottoman governance, such comments evince the political acculturation of Phanariots into the logic and structures of Ottoman governance. Such acculturation must have indeed seemed shameful or backward to those who increasingly saw themselves as part of a new, enlightened intellectual and socio-political movement, and it was they and their successors that wrote the national histories of this region.

It was not Ottoman officials that provided us with painstakingly detailed descriptions of the Phanariot investiture ceremony I have just summarized, but rather a mid-level Phanariot functionary, himself a product and beneficiary of the Phanariot ascendancy—none other than Dionysios Photeinos. Moreover, it is his 1819 work that Kitromilides quotes from. Photeinos’ life story displays the integration process at the turn of the nineteenth century writ small. While he did make the disparaging comment about Phanariots and their Wallachian partners, he was part of their administration, and a part-time court historian for the Phanariot voyvoda of Wallachia at that time. A few words about his trajectory will illuminate the structures and contingencies that shaped Phanariot horizons.

Dionysios Photeinos was born in 1769 in Patras, overlooking what was Ottoman Morea, known in Greek as the Peloponnese, and his ancestors were from the nearby Peloponnese (hence his epithet Dionysios Photeinos ho Peloponnesios).Footnote ⁴² His father, Athanasios Photeinos, had moved the family to Istanbul since he was the physician of Sultan Abdülhamit I (r. 1774–1789) until that sultan's death in 1789. At that point, the family moved back to the Peloponnese, but Dionysios, now in his early twenties, soon returned to Istanbul to continue his studies. From there he continued on to Wallachia around 1799.Footnote ⁴³

Once he arrived in Bucharest, Photeinos gave music lessons, for in addition to his work as a historian he was also a cantor in the Orthodox Church and composed hymns. The combination of government service, history-writing, and music and poetry composition was typical of Photeinos’ Muslim-Ottoman counterparts, not to mention his Romanian-Phanariot predecessor Dimitrie Cantemir.Footnote ⁴⁴ Photeinos entered the “court” (or service of the voyvoda) as a “simple bataphos (vataf, overseer) of the Divan,” under the protection of the Grand Bano (ban) Dimitraki Ghikas, in whose house he resided, perhaps as tutor for his children or simply a member of his household.Footnote ⁴⁵ With his patron Dimitraki Ghikas he fled the rebel ayan Pasvantoğlu during the reign of Michael Soutsos (in 1802), and later returned, still at the side of Ghikas, the boyar, with whose support he rose in the hierarchy of the princely retinue. He achieved offices in the Divan, such as one overseeing its lucrative salt mines.

In 1808, while Wallachia was under Russian administration (1806–1812), the Ottoman central state in Istanbul was in profound disarray, and Constantine HypsilantisFootnote ⁴⁶ had been expelled as voyvoda. The administration had been reorganized and many of the “special” offices of the prince had been abolished. The significant income extracted from the provinces was no longer distributed among these special offices, but now concentrated in the hands of one archon, who each year reported and passed the income on to one official, the grand vestiar. Photeinos was apparently designated as this archon for one year of the Russian occupation, the first of several indications that he was operating in the fields of both Russian and Ottoman governance.

In 1812, on the eve of the reinstitution of Ottoman-Phanariot administration in the Principalities, Photeinos was appointed ispravnik Footnote ⁴⁷ in the district of Gialomitza, likely by the Grand Bano and General-Major Kostaki Ghikas, who had himself been appointed “President of the Divan” by the Russian Çiçakov. Photeinos remained in this office until the arrival of the Ottoman-Phanariot Voyvoda Karaca. We know that he must have served in some official capacity from 1812 until the publication of his history in 1818–1819, and therefore survived politically the transition from Russian to Ottoman rule in the Principalities, but we do not know precisely how. In 1818 he reveals in correspondence to his editor-publisher Zinovios Pop that he was waiting for a promotion to come through, and thus cannot yet refer to his title in his book. During this time he was on the outs with Prince Karaca because of a satire he had composed that targeted him, but the prince apparently forgave Photeinos when he saw the published first volume of the history in 1818, at which time he awarded him the title of Grand Serdar.Footnote ⁴⁸

In these years, in addition to engaging in political maneuvering and career advancement, Photeinos worked on two histories. One was the fascinating three-volume History of the Former Dacia (Historia tes Palai Dakias) that is under discussion here; the other, never completed, was a history of the Ottoman sultans from Mehmed II to Mahmud.Footnote ⁴⁹ At first glance, Photeinos’ use of Dacia in the title of his completed oeuvre for Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania seems odd, since the name is neither the Ottoman demarcation of the area nor a national category, but rather a Roman administrative label. But it also evokes Russian Empress Catherine the Great and Habsburg Emporor Joseph II's “Greek plan,” of a few decades earlier, to create an independent kingdom out of Moldavia and Wallachia under that name.Footnote ⁵⁰ The reference to Dacia in the title, together with much of the content of Photeinos’ history, betrays not only a classicizing tendency typical of his well-educated contemporaries to the north and west but also an elaborate if incipient imagination emerging from Phanariot involvement in Ottoman governance. This imagination was neither national in the sense that would emerge in the course of the nineteenth century, nor simply an Orthodox Christian commonwealth vision of uniting with Russia and resuscitating Byzantium.Footnote ⁵¹ Instead, Photeinos narrates the history of Dacia as a geographic entity and administrative district, peopled and ruled by a succession of groups over the ages. (He begins with the area's first human habitation as narrated by historians in the fourth century b.c.) By the third volume, which begins with the founding of the Principality of Moldavia in the fourteenth century and covers the entire Ottoman period (from the fourteenth–nineteenth centuries), and particularly when he reaches the events and reigns he personally witnessed, the descriptions are, as one would expect, more detailed and complex in their presentations of Ottoman and Phanariot politics.

Particularly striking in Photeinos’ description of Dacia and Phanariot administration of it in his own time is the pride with which he notes the status of Phanariot voyvodas within the Ottoman system. For instance, he writes braggingly about investiture by the sultan and the Ottoman symbols of the voyvodas’ position. (For example, they enjoyed the rank of two-and-a-half horsetails—the highest being three horsetails for the grand vizier.)Footnote ⁵² When describing the succession of civil conflicts in 1807–1808, he alternates between the battlefront against Russia in the Danubian Principalities and the conflict in Istanbul between central state loyalists and rebel janissaries and others. He claims at several points that inhabitants of all religions and classes united to defend the Empire against Russia.Footnote ⁵³

VI. THE MILLET SYSTEM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Historians have not generally examined Phanariots and their Muslim-Ottoman counterparts within the same framework. Beyond preoccupations with military and institutional levels of governance, this lacuna reflects larger assumptions about inter-confessional relations. The system of millets—confessional nations that were the basis for Ottoman administration—has been a subject of debate over the past generation. Some say non-Muslims inhabited their own autonomous communities and had little interaction with the Muslim state apparatus. Others say there was no consistent millet entity until the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. The very terms of this debate, like those of the debate over the New Order (Nizam-ı Cedid) reforms, reflect a preoccupation with formal institutional and legal definitions. Certainly in the legal arena there were basic divisions between Muslims, as adherents of the ruling state religion, and Christians and Jews, who enjoyed the in-between status of zimmi, or People of the Book, both protected and shunned as second-class subjects. That said, institutional and legal definitions tell us little of the social realities of Ottoman governance, particularly at century's turn when formal institutions were in profound crisis.

This is not to deny that the Orthodox Church apparatus and doctrines had a tremendous impact on the lives of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, or that their identity may have been first and foremost as Christians in a Muslim-dominated state. Recruitment into Phanariot networks occurred through Church affiliations, in addition to family relations and more formal schooling opportunities in the Principalities and elsewhere.

The list of subscribers to Dionysios Photeinos’ three-volume History of the Former Dacia attests to the intricacies within the sphere of Orthodox Christianity of the Ottoman Empire. One of the many fascinating aspects of Photeinos’ work on Moldavia and Wallachia was the list, or katalogos, of “philokalon kai philomouson syndrometon,” or “subscribers who were lovers of beauty and letters” that precedes the history. In it we see traces of the processes of socialization and acculturation into a Phanariot—and by extension Ottoman—political culture that he and many others were part of. It includes approximately 350 individuals, divided into forty categories, which together form a socio-political portrait of what I am calling the Phanariot network, in the 1810s. This portrait reveals both identity and difference within the world of Orthodox Christian Ottoman subjects, as well as between that world and the larger Ottoman world in which it was embedded.

The categories are organized at once hierarchically, geographically, and by profession. Presiding at the top of the list are the “Most High and Pious Princes (hegemones),” which include the reigning Phanariot Prince of Moldavia Scarlatos Voyvodas Alexandrou Voyvoda Kallimaki (r. 1812–1819), and the two Phanariots who were vying for the vacant throne of Wallachia at that moment: Alexandros Voyvoda Soutsos and Alexandros Voyvoda Hantzeris. After this most illustrious group comes the geographical designation “in Bucharest,” made up first of a beyzade (son of a prince) and two major generals, then twenty-one categories of officials of the Wallachian princely administration. Sixteen of these groups of officials are also called “archons,” and their subdivisions include a combination of Romanian, Byzantine-ecclesiastical, and Turkish titles, from banoi,Footnote ⁵⁴vorniks, and kloutziarides, to logethetes and megaloi vestiaroi, to ağas and serdars—reflecting the range of idioms—Greek, Romanian, and Turkish among them—that were being melded into this Phanariot world. After these official functionaries come the professions: “oi exohotatoi giatroi” (his excellencies the doctors), the “timiotatoi pragmateutai” (the most honorable merchants), the “ellogimiotatoi didaskaloi” (the most lettered/learned teachers), and finally, the members of the “ierou katalogou,” or clergy.

After this assemblage of social groups in Bucharest comes a mixed social group of fourteen, all in Craiova (a commercial city west of Bucharest), and then six distinguished Constantinopolitan archons, including the current grand dragoman of the “Ruling Ottoman Kingdom,” Michael Soutsos, the former Grand Dragoman Iakovos Argyropoulos, and the Grand PostelniksFootnote ⁵⁵ Iakovos Rizos-Neroulos (with his four sons) and Alexandros Mavrocordatos. The Istanbuliote subscribers are sandwiched between the categories of Bucharest and Jassy, the latter being Moldavia's capital. The categories of officials in Moldavia mirror those in Wallachia in that they are organized hierarchically, although they display some extra categories, such as the archontes megaloi postelnikoi (quasi-foreign ministers), and there are fewer officials (fifty-seven names) than Wallachia (about 150 names). Moldavia was territorially smaller, which would account for some of this difference. Finally, there are four final, geographic categories—“in Galatz” (a port city on the Danube in Moldavia—containing six names), in Peloponnese (four names), in Patras (Paliai Patrai—eighteen names), and in Vienna (three names, one of whom is noted as having subscribed through an acquaintance in Wallachia).

The subscriber categories reveal that there was both an explicit structure associated with Phanariot rule—expressed in the hierarchy of offices under the two Phanariot voyvodas—and an implicit social and geographical structure which held the Principalities to the Ottoman capital and to particular localities such as the Peloponnese, and even—at least through a few individuals—to Vienna (the only city mentioned from outside Ottoman domains). But how did individuals fit into and, presumably, move through this structure? To address this question, we can examine this same subscriber list as a snapshot of 350 individuals at particular locations on their way up the hierarchy.

Kitromilides demonstrates his argument about the not-yet-national southeast European Enlightenment through the life of one Iosipos Moisodax (ca. 1725–1800). Moisiodax was an Orthodox Christian of Vlach-speaking origins from today's northern Bulgaria. Like many of his fellow countrymen that engaged in trade in central Europe he became Hellenized, and he entered the Orthodox Christian clergy, where knowledge of Greek, the language of the Church and letters, was a necessity. This process of Hellenization was hardly unique to Moisiodax, whose case reinforces the earlier arguments of scholars such as Traiain Stoianovich regarding the Hellenization of Bulgarian-, Romanian-, Vlach-, Albanian-, and Serbian-speaking Christians as a vehicle for social mobility into the Balkan Christian mercantile classes in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, neither Kitromilides nor Stoianovich focus their attentions on the Ottoman context; rather, they are more interested in how the motivation to learn Greek and, for some, to identify oneself as culturally “Greek” had to do with entering Christian merchant networks and/or the Christian clergy.

Linking this world of Greek/Hellenized merchants and clergy to the larger world of Ottoman governance allows us to see an additional dimension—not only the daily social and political realities of these Balkan Christians as Ottoman subjects, but also the symbolic, cultural, and political connections that were forged between Phanariot retinues and networks on the one hand, and elements of what is considered Ottoman governance “proper” on the other. That more complete picture, in turn, reveals that another career path was taking shape for Orthodox Christians in the late eighteenth century: the path into the retinues of Phanariot princes and dragomans. This, like the paths to commerce and the clergy, necessitated Hellenization, for the Greek language enjoyed primacy among the Phanariot nomenklatura, as it did in the Greek Orthodox Church and in the networks of Greek merchants. Hellenization meant learning Greek letters, but also changing one's name to fit Greek linguistic and cultural conventions.

We can draw from many real-world examples of humbler Christians joining the ranks of Phanariot retinues. Returning to Photeinos’ list of subscribers, the most famous examples are the princes themselves: Scarlatos Voyvodas Alexandrou Voyvoda Kallimaki. The Kallimaki family was originally Romanian-speaking, and Hellenized into the Phanariot elite in the later seventeenth century. They were thus well placed to qualify for the office of prince when “indigenous” Romanian boyars were ousted from power and Phanariots gained ascendancy in ruling the Principalities in the second decade of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Ghikas family, also listed in the top category, and therefore top echelon of Phanariot society, had migrated from “Albania” to the Ottoman capital in the seventeenth century. Their ancestor Georgios was said to have been a childhood friend of Mehmed Köprülü, founder of the Köprülü Dynasty of grand viziers that was credited with restoring Ottoman power in the second half of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a striking parallel between processes of social mobility among Christians and Muslim converts from Christianity, the Albanian Ghikas family remained Christian but Hellenized, while the Albanian (T. Arnavut) Mehmed Köprülü was a Muslim convert from Christianity who then assimilated into the Ottoman ruling class through the slave (devşirme-kul) system. A biographer of the Ghikas family suggests Georgios joined Mehmed Köprülü's faction in Istanbul in 1653, and achieved commercial and political successes with the latter's support.Footnote ⁵⁹

It was not just the most famous and powerful Phanariots that were shifting “ethnic” identities within the bounds of Orthodox Christianity.Footnote ⁶⁰ Common on the list are Hellenized Romanian names such as Nicholaos Philippeskos (archon ağa of Bucharest, and an important patron of Photeinos’) or Pavlos Patreskos (archon serdar). There are also Hellenized names of possibly more complicated origins, such as Konstantinos Tattareskos (containing the word “Tatar” with a Hellenized Romanian -escu ending), Scarlatos Tzerkezis (a Hellenized -is ending to the Turkish designation for a Circassian (Çerkez), Scarlatos Stoigianneskos (Stoian, a common Serbian/Slavic name, Hellenized into Stoigiannes, with Romanian -escu and a Greek -os), and Ioannitzas Tsalikovitz (Greek rendering of the Serbian/Slavic “-ovich” ending to the Turkish çelik, meaning steel).

Other names indicate origins geographically remote from the Danubian Principalities. One example is of a man of possibly Turkish-speaking Christian origins, Radoukanos Karamanlis (denoting origins in central Anatolia, where Christian populations were overwhelmingly turcophone). Another is Gregorios Mavrodoglous (a Hellenized Turkish -oğlu ending common among the Karamanli of Anatolia). There are even names of Armenian origins, such as Gregorios Balianos (archon megalos vornik) (also known as Krikor amira Balyan [1764–1831], the Armenian palace architect for the Ottoman state and the father of Garabed amira Balyan, architect of Dolmabahçe Palace in the mid-nineteenth century)Footnote ⁶¹ and the Archon Logothetes Gregorios Baltzianos, not to mention those of closer-to-home Vlach origins such as Archon Grammatikos Manouel Vlachides. Finally, there is at least one name with known Bulgarian-language origins, Stephanos Vogorides (who had changed his name from his birth name, Stoiko Tsonkovich, in the 1790s), and there are several with indications of geographic origins, such as the Archon Serdar Georgios Laskari Peloponnesios (from the Peloponnese), the “eugenestatos kyrios Andreas Soteriou Lontou ek Vostitsis” (from Vostitsa), ellogimiotatos didaskalos Demetrios Ithakesios (“the most learned teacher Demetrios from the island of Ithaka,” placed among those on the list living in the port town of Galatz), and the Archon Hatman of Bucharest Konstantinos Karydes ho Kyprios (the Cypriot).

I offer these many examples to show, first, that Hellenization was going on beyond the spheres of commerce and the clergy, which have heretofore been the focus of scholarship.Footnote ⁶² But these examples also illustrate the ways that the Phanariot administration of Ottoman Moldavia and Wallachia was serving as a portal for Orthodox Christians—of both Greek- and non-Greek-speaking origins—to enter the world of the Phanariot, and by extension Ottoman governance. Their titles, though derived from Byzantine Church and Romanian contexts as well as Ottoman-Turkish sources, were important to their names and identities, and in most cases a Hellenized name was a prerequisite to belonging in the Ottoman imperial administration, through employment in a Phanariot retinue. And in addition to their “day jobs” as voyvodas, vestiars, or ağas, at least 350 of them seemed to be subscribing to and reading works of history that reflected their social and political outlook, as Christian Ottoman subjects and Phanariot functionaries associated with Moldavia and/or Wallachia.

There were not only multiple strata but also multiple processes of social mobility underway between these strata, all within the Orthodox Christian sphere. So far, this only reinforces the millet system paradigm that places Christians in separate, autonomous confessional communities, set apart from Muslims and from participation in Ottoman governance. In addition, however, to the social and “ethnic” mobility practiced by humbler Orthodox Christians at work under Phanariot princes, the princes themselves were hard at work striving for Ottoman cultural and political status and linking up with the larger world of Ottoman governance. Lest we think that Phanariots were focused solely on resuscitating Byzantium and creating an Orthodox Christian commonwealth, we must consider the connections between Phanariot elites and the Muslim-Ottoman ruling class “proper” in the sphere of cultural/literary production. In 1808, Iskerletzade Aleko commissioned a nasihatname, meaning “advice literature,” a work belonging to the very Persian-Ottoman genre of Mirrors for Princes. His name is the Ottoman-Turkish rendition of Alexandros Scarlatou Kallimaki, likely the father of Scarlatos Voyvodas Alexandrou Kallimaki, the reigning prince of Moldavia in Photeinos’ 1818 list of subscribers. This nasihatname was written in Ottoman Turkish, and followed precisely the formula of works composed for and commissioned by Muslim Ottoman dignitary-patrons at the time.Footnote ⁶³ Furthermore, one need only look at the churches that Phanariot princes had built in Moldavia and Wallachia throughout the eighteenth century to see their striking resemblance to contemporary Ottoman pavilions and other structures in Istanbul. The same was true of the villas Phanariots were building along the Bosphorus in the eighteenth century alongside those of Muslim Ottoman grandees.Footnote ⁶⁴

Phanariots were also using Muslim Ottoman officials and patronage to climb the social ladder. For example, in h. 1215 (ca. 1800–1801), one Manolaki, who had served in the retinue of Ismail Ferruh Efendi since his time as Ottoman envoy in England, and was now among the kapıkethüdasıs, or representatives to the Ottoman Court of Wallachia, wrote a petition for his son Yanko. Yanko was a dragoman of unspecified rank, and his father Manolaki was petitioning to arrange his pay schedule with the chief accountant.Footnote ⁶⁵ Another case shows Sultan Selim III pondering, in another note to his grand vizier in h. 1220 (ca. 1805–1806) whether to admit Kallimaki Bey, then voyvoda of Moldavia, into the retinue of [Alemdar] Mustafa Pasha, a pivotal figure in the upheaval of 1807–1808.Footnote ⁶⁶

And what would patronage be without gifts? In addition to the official taxes in kind to be collected from the Principalities and sent to the capital by the voyvodas and their administration, voyvodas were under many other obligations, such as to give annual holiday (‘aidiye) cash gifts to no less than sixty-nine high Ottoman officials, according to the h. 1212 (ca. 1797–1798) register. Totalling 30,000 kuruşFootnote ⁶⁷ these gifts ranged from 8,500 kuruş to the grand vizier down to 30 kuruş to the Kaftan-keeper and his assistant.Footnote ⁶⁸ Each time an appointment or promotion occurred there were specific payments to be made. For instance, when Todoraki, the older son of Tuğsuz Kamaraş,Footnote ⁶⁹ was recommended for appointment as an apprentice (çirak) dragoman, 20,000 kuruş were offered to the grand vizier, 10,000 to the kapudan paşa, and a little present (hediyecik) to his servants, with Todoraki's future service being his gift to the kethüda bey (interior minister) and reis efendi (foreign minister).Footnote ⁷⁰

To recap, Photeinos’ life and the list of subscribers display some of the fixed social categories and dynamic processes of social and concomitant “ethnic” mobility within the Orthodox Christian subject population in the early nineteenth century. The other examples I have presented indicate a few of the connections between Phanariot elites and their contemporaries in the Muslim-Ottoman ruling class. Taken together, a picture emerges of leading Phanariot dignitaries and their client-retinues as links between, first, the Orthodox Christian Church and subject populations, and second, several aspects of Ottoman governance, including Court politics, the Sublime Porte, foreign relations, military administration, provincial administration, tax farming, and even guild affairs.Footnote ⁷¹

VII. PHANARIOTS—AND OTHER OTTOMANS?

Situating Phanariots within the larger matrix of Ottoman governance and comparing them with their Muslim-Ottoman janissary, ayan, or even courtier counterparts, is something of a departure from the terms of current historiography for the early-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire.Footnote ⁷² There are good reasons why the current terms cannot accommodate this comparison. First, conflicts at the time were, and the historiography of the period has been preoccupied with the institutional, legal, and military realms of governance, particularly regarding the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷³ This was the period of the Nizam-ı Cedid, or New Order reforms under Sultan Selim III. One major goal of these reforms was to recoup power that had been taken by ayan (or provincial notables) over the course of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁴

The ayan phenomenon, understandably, is the central lens through which historians have viewed eighteenth-century Ottoman governance.Footnote ⁷⁵Ayan families began to dominate several sectors of governance in their respective provinces. Military power, tax farming, bureaucracy, and commerce were all combined in a patchwork of family dynasties across Ottoman lands. Taken together this is generally seen as the period of decentralization for the Ottoman Empire before efforts to re-centralize and modernize it, first by Selim III (1789–1807/8), then by Mahmud (1808–1839) and his successors. But what looks from the ayan or the central state standpoint to be decentralization (or privatization)Footnote ⁷⁶ appears from the Phanariot perspective to be a higher level of integration. We can explore this question by comparing the expansion of these two groups.

The precise recipe for each ayan family was different, but it always included military force and most often the purchase of life-term tax-farming rights. Beyond that, commercial connections, bureaucratic posts, and connections to the Muslim hierarchy (or Christian, depending on the demography of the province) were handy. As the official Ottoman infantry and cavalry eroded in the eighteenth century, ayan became crucial providers of military manpower for the central state in domestic and cross-border conflicts. As one ayan or their variant, a derebey, rebelled against the Ottoman center, an alliance of other ayan would battle the rebels with troops raised from their localities. This prompted frequent migration of both military and civilian populations, and it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two.

Phanariots were related to but distinct from the cast of ayan characters that rose to power during roughly the same period. The origin myth for both groups is intriguingly similar. In the Phanariot case, Panagiotis Nikousios was said to have been rewarded for his assistance to Grand Vizier Fazıl Ahmed Köprülü during the Ottoman siege of Crete in 1669 with the office of grand dragoman, thereby making the first foray into the Ottoman court. One generation later Alexander Mavrocordatos, as a reward for his service as the Ottoman delegate (with Reisülküttab Rami Mehmed Efendi) at the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1698–1699, succeeded Nikousios as grand dragoman and was made minister of the secrets (ex aporriton). His son Nicholas Mavrocordatos was appointed the first Phanariot prince of Moldavia (1711) and then Wallachia (1716). With the removal of indigenous Moldavian and Wallachian notables (boyars) from the candidate pool for princely positions, Istanbul-based Phanariots enjoyed eligibility to be invested with this office from Istanbul, and to travel to their province to rule almost as they pleased. The period of Phanariot ascendancy had begun.

As for the ayans, some, such as the Pasvantoğlu family, were originally the agents of Istanbul-based tax farmers who were called in to fight off the banditry in the countryside, which had been caused by sekban troops demobilized in the wake of hostilities with Austria between 1683 and 1699.Footnote ⁷⁷ This “began the process of official recognition and an increase in importance of the ayan in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire.”Footnote ⁷⁸ While the ayans started at the territorial margins and Phanariots at the imperial center, both were invited by actors within the struggling Ottoman state to take on roles in Ottoman governance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Both began with individualized personal connections to powerful officials, and eventually earned their own formal power by performing military or diplomatic-political feats highly valued by the central state elite.

Although ayans and Phanariots began their ascent at the same time, there were many differences between them beyond their respective entry points into governance. First, direct and formally sanctioned access to military force was not part of the Phanariot repertoire. They did maintain private militias in Wallachia and Moldavia and assisted as front-line interpreters in the many Ottoman military campaigns against the Austrians and Russians at the turn of the century. But they were not normally military leaders and therefore did not become provincial strongmen in the same way that ayans did.Footnote ⁷⁹

Second, unlike Muslim ayans, Phanariots were not eligible to acquire iltizam, life-term tax-farming systems that developed during the eighteenth century. And yet, Phanariot voyvodas and other high officials managed to accumulate land in the form of möşyes, and the privilege of collecting taxes on it, in Wallachia and Moldavia, and also a monopoly on the okna, or salt mines, in these principalities.Footnote ⁸⁰ This meant taking advantage of the liminal administrative and legal status of the Danubian Principalities with respect to Ottoman administration proper: autonomy gave them, as Christians, license not only to administer the Principalities but also to imitate the means of accumulating power and revenue that their Muslim counterparts enjoyed in Ottoman lands.

A third difference was that, while Phanariots had a serious stake in the trade and administration of several provinces, they relied on their activities in Istanbul for their legitimacy and their continued access to provincial offices. They were interpreters for the sultan, grand vizier, and other high officials and were therefore integrated into the practice of foreign relations between the Ottoman court and European states. While ayans such as Ali Paşa of Ioannina, the Karaosmanoğulları of Izmir, and Osman Pasvantoğlu of Vidin did have representatives at the Ottoman court and did conduct their own diplomacy directly with European envoys, Phanariots were conducting the sultan's diplomacy for the sultan. Furthermore, Phanariots were a series of families that revolved through the high offices open to them, rather than one specific family or personage tied to a specific region, as was the case with ayans. That Phanariots as Christians were officially limited to second-class status limited their horizons in some ways (such as exclusion from formal participation in the military arena of governance or direct access to iltizam), but it opened new possibilities in others. They used the empire-wide Orthodox Church apparatus for commercial enterprise and to facilitate the flow of information (as monks and clerics traveled regularly across the Empire and into Russian lands for alms or business with sister monasteries, bringing with them goods and information), and the autonomous realms of Moldavia and Wallachia could imitate Muslim ascendants to power. The Church also facilitated connections with the Russian Empire and its Orthodox Church.

The resolution of this Ottoman-Phanariot story comes with the 1819 Kanunname, or Regulation, known among contemporaries as the Hanedan-ı Erba'a, or Dynasty of Four.Footnote ⁸¹ In describing the Phanariot administration of the 1810s that prompted the reform measure, Photeinos condemns the expansion in official personnel:

Even though Photeinos claims that the voyvodas were creating new offices “to please the Ottomans,” the Ottoman central state had noted the expansion of offices as wrongful even as Photeinos’ history was under publication. With the support of Phanariot patron and court favorite Halet Efendi, an 1819 Kanunname was drawn up to “take back the reins” of Phanariot power and limit access to the highest four offices to four specific Phanariot families, to be known as the Hanedan-ı Erba'a: “Those descending from the Phanariot faction have been preferred for employment and have been close to the esteem of the strong state for some time now. The people who have reached the offices of imperial dragoman, dragoman of the fleet, and voyvodas of the Twin Principalities who are at times appropriate and at other times coming from the outside and deserving as well as undeserving of these offices has multiplied. Their love of advancement has become a breeding ground for them to intrigue against each other.”Footnote ⁸³

To solve this problem, four families would “have a monopoly” of the four high offices—that of the reigning Moldavian Voyvoda Kallimaki; of the current Wallachian Voyvoda Drakozade Aleko Soutsos; of Mihal Bey's line descending from the current Imperial Dragoman Drakozade Mihalaki Soutsos; and the “houses of the three brothers of the deceased Alexander Moruzis.” The other families who would be excluded from eligibility—such as Yakovaki (Argyropoulos) and the Hançerli (Hantzeris) families—would be paid a pension of sixty thousand and forty thousand kuruş, respectively, by the four reigning families.Footnote ⁸⁴

One could speculate endlessly on the particular motives, machinations, and alliances, both foreign and domestic, which led to the issuance of this regulation. Of immediate interest, however, is that the regulation represents the desire to formally integrate specific Phanariots into the matrix of Ottoman governance, to transform them from an amorphous (and uncontrollable) group into a collection of four organized dynasties, and to winnow down their numbers at the top and regularize membership in their retinues, rules for their election, and terms of office. And all of these just months before the outbreak of the Greek rebellions that would, we know now, lead to the establishment of an independent Greek Kingdom under great-power protection, the first independent successor-state of the Ottoman Empire.