During much of the four centuries of the “Tourkokratia,” as the period of Ottoman rule in Greece is known, there was little hope that the Greeks would be able to free themselves by their own efforts. There were sporadic revolts, such as those that occurred on the mainland and on the islands of the Aegean following the defeat of the Ottoman navy in 1571 by Don John of Austria, the short-lived revolt launched by Dionysius Skylosophos in Epirus in 1611, and the abortive uprising in the Peloponnese in 1770 at the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74. These uprisings had little chance of success, but during the Tourkokratia there was some armed resistance against the Turks by the klephts (social bandits or brigands). In their banditry the klephts did not distinguish between Greek and Turk, but their attacks on such manifest symbols of Ottoman authority as tax collectors led to their being seen by Greeks in later periods as acting on behalf of the Greeks against Ottoman oppressors. Certainly, they are viewed in this light in the corpus of klephtic ballads that emerged, extolling the bravery and military prowess of the klephts as well as their heroic resistance to the Ottomans.

In an effort to counter the plunderous activities of the klephts and to control the mountain passes that were their favoured areas of operation, the Ottomans established a militia of armatoloi. Like the klephts, these were Christians, and the distinction between klepht and armatolos was a narrow one. One day’s klepht might be the next day’s armatolos. The existence of such armed formations meant that when the War of Greek Independence broke out in 1821, the klephts formed an invaluable reserve of military talent.

Belief in divine intervention

Greek aspirations for freedom were largely sustained by a collection of prophetic and messianic beliefs that foretold the eventual overthrow of the Turkish yoke as the result of divine rather than human intervention. Such were the oracles attributed to the Byzantine emperor Leo VI (the Wise), which foretold the liberation of Constantinople 320 years after its fall—in 1773. Many believed in that prophecy, for its fulfillment coincided with the great Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, one of the periodic confrontations between the two great regional powers (see Russo-Turkish wars). The Russians were the only Orthodox power not under foreign domination, and they were widely identified with the legendary xanthon genos, a fair-haired race of future liberators from the north. The Russians were seen as forming part of a commonwealth, which linked the various parts of the Orthodox Christian world with its common centres of pilgrimage in the monastic republic of Mount Athos (forming one of the three fingers of the Chalcidice Peninsula) and Jerusalem.

The role of the Orthodox church

The Orthodox church was the only institution on which the Greeks could focus. Through the use of Greek in the liturgy and through its modest educational efforts, the church helped to some degree to keep alive a sense of Greek identity, but it could not prevent Turkish (which was written with Greek characters) from becoming the vernacular of a substantial proportion of the Greek population of Asia Minor and of the Ottoman capital itself.

The Orthodox church, however, fell victim to the institutionalized corruption of the Ottoman system of government. The combination of civil and religious power in the hands of the ecumenical patriarchate and the upper reaches of the hierarchy prompted furious competition for high office. The Ottomans encouraged such behaviour, and it soon became the norm that, on every occasion when a new patriarch was installed, a huge peshkesh, or bribe, would be paid to the grand vizier, the sultan’s chief minister. Despite the fact that, in theory, a patriarch was elected for life, there was a high turnover in office, and some even held the office more than once. Grigorios V was executed by the Ottomans in 1821 during his third patriarchate, whereas during the second half of the 17th century Dionysius IV Mouselimis was elected patriarch at least five times. It was this kind of behaviour that prompted an 18th-century Armenian chronicler to taunt the Greeks that they changed their patriarch more frequently than they changed their shirt.

Bribes had to be paid to secure offices at all levels, and these could be recouped only through the taxes placed on the Orthodox faithful as a whole. The clergy’s reputation for rapacity led to the growth of popular anticlericalism, particularly among the small nationalist intelligentsia that emerged in the course of the 18th century. The anonymous author of that fiery nationalist polemic the “Ellinikhí Nomarkhía” (“Hellenic Nomarchy”) in 1806 was a bitter critic of the sloth and self-indulgence of the higher clergy, while Adamántios Koraïs, the intellectual mentor of the national revival, though careful to steer between what he termed the Scylla of superstition and the Charybdis of atheism, condemned the obscurantism of the clergy. What particularly incensed Koraïs and his kind was the willingness of the Orthodox hierarchy to identify its interests with those of the Ottoman authorities. However, the views of men such as Anthimos, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who argued in 1798 that the Ottoman Empire was part of the divine dispensation granted by God to protect Orthodoxy from the taint of Roman Catholicism and of Western secularism and irreligion, were not unusual.

Signs of Ottoman decline

By the end of the 17th century, the prolonged process of Ottoman decline was clearly under way. The failure of the Siege of Vienna in 1683 signaled the retreat of the Ottomans in the European provinces of the empire. The military triumphs of earlier centuries gave way to pressure on their empire from the Austrians, the Russians, and the Persians. The Russian threat culminated in the 1768–74 war with Turkey, and the Russians subsequently claimed the right to exercise a protectorate over all the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of their interpretation of the terms of the peace settlement with the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca.

Forced onto the defensive, the empire lost territory, and the control of the Ottoman Porte over its enormous provinces weakened. In both European and Asiatic Turkey, provincial warlords supplanted the authority of the sultan. The example of successful defiance of the Porte carried out by powerful satraps such as Ali Paşa Tepelenë, the Muslim Albanian who ruled over a large portion of mainland Greece, gave encouragement to Greek nationalists because it demonstrated that the empire was no longer the invincible monolith it had once been.