The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, as stated by the series editor Thomas W. Gallant, is an ambitious project which aims to cover the history of the Greek people from antiquity to our days. In the current volume Molly Greene offers a fresh perspective on the history of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire.
Greene subverts the title's promise from the start, by beginning her story not from that traditional, and hugely symbolic, point of departure that is the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, but a space and time which paint a different picture of the new Ottoman reality: fourteenth-century Thessaly. She does this because the study of Ottoman Thessaly is extremely interesting in its own right, as new settlements were created which led to the establishment of significant Ottoman urban centres in the Balkans, such as Yenişehir (Larissa) for example. Crucially, she also does this to shift the discussion away from the ideologically laden Istanbul-centric narrative. The Ottoman experience of Greek communities (because there were many) did not start in 1453, and most certainly did not start in Constantinople/Istanbul.
In this first of eight chapters, Greene focuses on the influence the Evrenos family had on Thessaly in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as the absorption of the local ruling classes in the process of conquest. Following in the steps of Bryer and Stavrides, Greene suggests that local elements, such as the Greek/Christian sipahis became the faces of Ottoman conquest, but were also ‘written out’ of the historiography, as their presence did not fit in the paradigm of the conqueror as ‘Turco-Islamic-foreigner’ (p. 8). Greene also explores the restoration of village life in the countryside with the establishment of vakıf (cash endowment) and derbend (pass guard) villages to secure mountain passes and trade routes. Alongside these ‘special’ arrangements with the Ottoman state, Greene discusses the development of monastic life and ‘burst of monastic construction which also characterised this period. Monasteries did not constitute ‘centres of resistance’, but flourished in the Ottoman period, as they managed to negotiate a modus vivendi within the new reality. A ‘patchwork of special arrangements’ was well established ‘long before Fatih Mehmet entered the fabled captal of the Byzantines’ (p. 15).
Inevitably, the next stop in our story is the transition from Constantinople to Istanbul. Greene focuses on three points: the elite, the city and the Patriarchate. She recounts how some members of the Byzantine elite who were deemed useful to the Ottomans were able to rise to the highest levels of Ottoman government, such as Demetrios Paleologos. In terms of the city, Greene describes how its population increased in the following decades, and that the Greek populations were able to flourish in the Galata district. Finally, Greene downplays the importance of the Patriarchate and the Church in this period, reiterating the point also made by Tom Papademetriou and others that in this period any ‘privileges’ and arrangements between the state and the higher clergy were strictly personal, and that the institutional recognition which would be a characteristic of the nineteenth century was non-existent at this time.
The third chapter discusses the position of the Greeks as Christians within an Islamic state. Greene places the Greek Orthodox community firmly within the Ottoman context, by examining in detail the drive for religious orthodoxy of the sixteenth century which affected both Muslim and Christian communities. Greene again downplays the narrative of Greeks as marginal components of Ottoman society in favour of a more integrated narrative which crosses the artificial confessional divides to examine other possibilities, placing Greeks into the ‘Ottomanist narrative’ (p. 58).
In the fourth chapter Greene opens up her discussion of Ottoman Greeks by looking at the wider Greek world, and especially the Ottoman conquests against their Latin rivals in places like Rhodes, Cyprus and Crete. Greene suggests that, as in Thessaly, the Ottoman conquest served to bring stability to the Aegean, and on the whole enabled Greek Orthodoxy to flourish, especially in places where it had been under direct pressure (such as Cyprus). This development also allowed Greek merchants to occupy the vacuum created by the abolition of special privileges for Venetian and other Italian merchants. Greene shifts her attention to the venerated paradigm of the ‘conquering Greek Orthodox merchant’, and Nikolai Todorov's description of Istanbul's post-conquest emergence as a hugely important imperial city at the crossroads of many trade routes. Todorov places the emergence of the eighteenth century Greek merchants squarely on this development. Greene points out that, while this framework is ‘not incorrect’, it is incomplete, as it presents the emergence of these Greek merchants as a ‘purely internal Ottoman affair’ (p. 97). Greene suggests that Greeks were able to operate much more widely, and benefited greatly from their inclusion in Venetian trade networks and structures. The Greek community in Venice was not the result of war and conquest, formed by refugees, but was established by wealthy Venetian Greeks. These Greeks were able to operate across the ‘official’ Veneto-Ottoman boundary, or despite it.
In the fifth chapter the Greek elites are discussed within the framework of the seventeenth century crisis. Greene firmly places a decline in new religious buildings and patronage within the wider context of Ottoman society. Such a decline and shift was also observed in the Muslim community with the shift away from the building of new ‘Friday’ mosques and towards medreses. The frequency with which Patriarchs were also removed and replaced also chimes with the turnover in the office of the Grand Vezir, within the context of a period of instability for the elites, and finally the emergence of new elites in the provinces in the shape of tax farmers and regional notables.
The sixth chapter examines the experience of the Greeks through the lens of the reformation and counter-reformation, and especially the influx of Catholic missionaries into the Ottoman Empire. This development posed a challenge and offered opportunities to the Greek Ottoman elite, with many of its members taking the opportunity to receive an education in Italy. However, it was also a time of division and conflict between pro-Catholic and pro-protestant factions within the clergy.
Chapter seven, titled ‘The patriarch's victory’, maps the eighteenth-century emergence of the Patriarchate as a political entity which represented the Greek community to the Ottoman state for the first time since the conquest. Greene supplements the dominant, if limited, narrative of the Greek merchant with that of the emergent Patriarchs, the stabilisation of their office and their explicit association with taxation. Green points out that this narrative demonstrates that the Patriarchate-as-political-entity was a creation of this period, alongside the emergence of a new urban elite. This was by no means just a Greek phenomenon, as Greene points out.
The eighth and final chapter concludes with the ‘second’ phase of Greek enlightenment, when education and ‘intellectual life had moved out of the control of the elites and the church’ (p. 195) and into the hand of the emergent new class of merchants influenced by the French enlightenment.
Greene's work follows on from Tom Papademetriou's final debunking of the millet system to turn the history of the Greek people in the Ottoman period to a history of Ottoman Greeks. She does this expertly, not by simply refuting the existing (if withering) dominant narrative which places Greeks as the disempowered, conquered minority, but by examining Greek communities within the wider Ottoman and Mediterranean contexts and their complexities. Greene's work should be a starting point for all new students of Ottoman social history, as it goes beyond the narrow scope its title suggests to reposition the history of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire in an integrated manner which acknowledges the delicate complexities of Ottoman society. This should be considered the final nail on the coffin of the nationalist narrative, which offers a narrow and inaccurate view. The fact that we keep revisiting it, however, demonstrates its lasting power and its deep roots.
