Ottoman Greece - Ottoman Decline

Ottoman Decline

After the unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Vienna, in 1683, the Ottoman Empire entered a long decline both militarily against the Christian powers and internally, leading to an increase in corruption, repression and inefficiency. This provoked discontent which led to disorders and occasionally rebellions. As more areas drifted out of Ottoman control, the Ottomans resorted to military rule in parts of Greece. This only provoked further resistance. Moreover, it led to economic dislocation, as well as accelerated population decline.

Another sign of decline was that Ottoman landholdings, previously fiefs held directly from the Sultan, became hereditary estates (chifliks), which could be sold or bequeathed to heirs. The new class of Ottoman landlords reduced the hitherto free Greek peasants to serfdom, leading to further poverty and depopulation in the plains. Athens was on its most part a ran-down village, its peasant Greek population extremely poor and isolated, not allowed near the Acropolis where the more wealthy Turks were settled.

The French diplomat and philhellene François-René de Chateaubriand after his visit in Sounion in 1806, wrote his impressions: «Around me there were graves, silence, disaster, death and some Greek sailors sleeping without cares on the ruins of Greece. I abandoned that divine place forever, my head filled with its greatness in the past and its downfall today». However, the overall Greek population in the plains was reinforced by the return of some Greeks from the mountains during the 17th century.

On the other hand, the position of educated and privileged Greeks within the Ottoman Empire improved greatly in the 17th and 18th centuries. As the empire became more settled, and began to feel its increasing backwardness in relation to the European powers, it increasingly recruited Greeks who had the kind of administrative, technical and financial skills which the Ottomans lacked.

From the late 1600s Greeks began to fill some of the highest and most important offices of the Ottoman state. The Phanariotes, a class of wealthy Greeks who lived in the Phanar district of Constantinople, became increasingly powerful. Their travels to Western Europe as merchants or diplomats brought them into contact with advanced ideas of liberalism and nationalism, and it was among the Phanariotes that the modern Greek nationalist movement was born. Many Greek merchants and travelers were influenced by the ideas of the French revolution and a new Age of Greek Enlightenment was initiated at the beginning of 17th century in many Ottoman occupied Greek cities and towns.

Greek nationalism was also stimulated by agents of Catherine the Great, the Orthodox ruler of the Russian Empire, who hoped to acquire the lands of the declining Ottoman state, including Constantinople itself, by inciting a Christian rebellion against the Ottomans. However, during the Russian-Ottoman War which broke out in 1768, the Greeks did not rebel, disillusioning their Russian patrons. The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji (1774) gave Russia the right to make "representations" to the Sultan in defense of his Orthodox subjects, and the Russians began to interfere regularly in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire. This, combined with the new ideas let loose by the French Revolution of 1789, began to reconnect the Greeks with the outside world and led to the development of an active nationalist movement, one of the most progressive of the time.

Greece was peripherally involved in the Napoleonic Wars, but one episode had important consequences. When the French under Napoleon Bonaparte seized Venice in 1797, they also acquired the Ionian Islands, thus ending the four hundredth year of Venetian rule over the Ionian Islands. The islands were elevated to the status of a French dependency called the Septinsular Republic, which possessed local autonomy. This was the first time Greeks had governed themselves since the fall of Trebizond in 1461.

Among those who held office in the islands was John Capodistria, destined to become independent Greece's first head of state. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Greece had re-emerged from its centuries of isolation. British and French writers and artists began to visit the country, and wealthy Europeans began to collect Greek antiquities. These "philhellenes" were to play an important role in mobilizing support for Greek independence.