Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (39 page)
Authors: David Brewer
Tags: #History / Ancient
The growth of Greek shipping brought prosperity to many Greeks, and sometimes spectacular profits. According to the French consul at Árta the profit on exported grain was 60 per cent, on tobacco 400 per cent, and on some other products even higher. Greeks employed by the shippers increasingly replaced local selling agents at the port of delivery, thus keeping the substantial agent’s commission within the business. But the profitable export of grain and other agricultural products was often resented by the Greeks who could no longer afford to buy them at home.
The Napoleonic wars increased profits further, partly because west European merchants largely disappeared from the Mediterranean and partly because running the English blockade of the southern French coast was so lucrative. Thus the aggregate profits of all the Hydra merchants reached a peak in 1816, but by 1820 had fallen to less than a fifth of that level. This sharp fall in prosperity, it has been suggested, coupled with the resentment of those who felt that the prosperity had been achieved at their expense, fuelled the general Greek discontent that in 1821 boiled over into revolt.
At the base of this flourishing of Greek maritime trade were, of course, the sailors who made up the crews. Samuel Howe, though generally sympathetic to the Greeks, was critical of the way the crews worked: ‘The interior of each vessel presented a scene of still greater confusion and insubordination: there was the Captain – but between him and the common sailor, there was a void, unfilled by an officer – no lieutenants or midshipmen, or grade of any kind. No portion of duty was allotted: no gangs were formed; if a sailor saw anything that appeared to him necessary to be done, he did it without waiting for an order; or if an order was given, all hands sprung to perform it at once, though not more than five, perhaps, were necessary.’
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But a more appreciative if slightly condescending picture comes from the French traveller Antoine Castellan, who had time to get to know the Greek sailors on a voyage of several months in 1796.
‘Let us gather together’, he wrote,
some of those scattered traits which compose the portrait of the Greeks with whom we have been living. Captain, officers, sailors, all had the
same qualities and the same defects, more or less. Their fundamental character seemed to be a mixture of light-heartedness, weakness, and boastfulness. As easily moved to tears as children, the very next minute they forget the reason for their pity. Excitable as children, they let themselves be carried away to a furious pitch of anger, and quieten down just as easily if they encounter indifference or are overawed by firm treatment. We did not notice among them those antipathies, those inveterate hatreds which lead men to revenge and betrayal. They often quarrelled among themselves; insults would lead to a fight between two opponents, but a third would put a stop to it by shouting more loudly and striking more vehemently: the quarrel would end at that, and a quarter of an hour later would be forgotten. Sensitive to upbraiding and to blame, praise pleases them much more than rewards; the slightest success fills them with energy. Courageous, and often foolhardy, but without enough self-control to be cautious, their ardour cools down upon reflection. They become discouraged, lose their heads; fear overcomes them and their last resource is to call religion to their aid; then they prostrate themselves before the Panayía, pray feverishly, make vows, and promise pilgrimages which they sometimes perform. Usually very sober, they nevertheless made the most of an opportunity to have a feast, and then they abandoned themselves to excess and bore the ensuing suffering with a steadfastness of purpose and above all with more gaiety than we could. Farewell, good people who are wrongfully scorned and so unreasonably maligned because you are not well enough known. I have compared you to children, and, in truth, all that you need is a deeper and wider education in order to become men.
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Greeks and the Enlightenment
T
he Enlightenment was a Europe-wide movement that began in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Its aim was to remove the heavy blanket of tradition, religious authority and inherited belief that its leaders believed was stifling thought and denying political freedom. These leaders all argued for an increase of religious toleration and stricter limits on government power. They included philosophers in the narrower sense of those concerned with the foundations of knowledge in both science and morality, such as Spinoza, Locke and Kant. There were also scientists such as Newton and Linnaeus, economists (Turgot and Adam Smith), political reformers (Condorcet, Beccaria and Bentham), historians (the Scot William Robertson) and statesmen such as the framers of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The largest group were the French
philosophes
, broadly concerned with questions of man and his relation to God and to society. Among the most influential were Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, and we should add Diderot and d’Alembert, the compilers of the
Encyclopédie
, a twenty-volume compendium of all aspects of knowledge.
Two basic principles underlay Enlightenment thinking. One was commitment to reason, and rejection of anything that stands in its way. Thus the
Encyclopédie
defined a
philosophe
as one who ‘trampling on prejudice, universal consent, authority, in a word all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself’. The other principle was that, just as laws can be found regulating natural phenomena, so there should be a search for laws and principles governing human behaviour. As Voltaire wrote, ‘It would be very singular that all nature and all the stars should obey eternal laws, and that there should be one little animal five feet tall which, despite these laws, could always act as suited its own caprice.’
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Derived from these principles, and influenced particularly by the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire, were the doctrines of liberty, equality and the rights of man – of particular relevance to the Greeks. In 1789 these doctrines were proclaimed in the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of Citizens: ‘Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security, and Resistance of Oppression.’ The Declaration was drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had served with distinction in America’s war of independence. He based the French Declaration on the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, which had been even more explicit about the right of the people to overthrow an unjust government: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.’
It will be clear from the names already mentioned of original Enlightenment thinkers that they came from many different countries including France, England, Scotland, America, Germany, Sweden and Italy. No such original thinkers came from Greece. Greeks were recipients of Enlightenment ideas rather than originators of them. Furthermore those Greeks who were influenced by the Enlightenment were a limited number of the Greek intelligentsia often living outside the territory of today’s Greece.
Those Greeks influenced by the Enlightenment fall, broadly speaking, into two categories: educators and revolutionaries. Educators include those who taught in Greek schools both in Greece and abroad, those who produced summaries of Enlightenment works or directly translated them, and those who produced Greek periodicals. Revolutionaries criticised the present state of Greece, often with particular animus against the church, and looked forward to Greek regeneration, revolution and independence. But the thinking of the two groups overlapped, since both educators and revolutionaries often saw better education as an essential preliminary to revolution.
One of the earliest of the Greek educators influenced by the Enlightenment was Evyénios Voúlgaris. He was born in 1716 in Corfu, and it was during his schooling there that he may have been introduced to the works of John Locke. Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
had been published only a few decades earlier in 1690, and its novel approach to philosophy formed one of the main strands of Voúlgaris’ thinking. Another strand, of Orthodox religious belief, was evident when at the age of 21 Voúlgaris became a deacon. In 1742 he became head of a school in Iánnina and in 1750 of one in Kozáni, after a dispute with a conservative teacher at a rival Iánnina school.
An even more prestigious appointment followed in 1753 when Voúlgaris became head of the recently established academy at the monastery of Vatopédhi on Mt Athos. The academy had been founded by the reforming patriarch Kírillos V, one of whose objects was to improve monastic education, and it was open both to Mt Athos monks and to pupils from outside. The academy was housed in a special building of three floors on higher ground next to the monastery, and had about 170 small rooms for students as well as lecture rooms and a library. The more advanced courses, in philosophy and mathematics, were taught by Voúlgaris himself. Of all the schools then in Greece it probably had the most influential supporter in the patriarch, the best facilities, and in Voúlgaris one of the most progressive teachers.
Nevertheless, after only six years Voúlgaris abruptly left the academy, which thereafter went into decline; a visitor to the site in 1801 said that ‘its only inhabitant that we found was a solitary cock.’
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The reasons for Voúlgaris’ departure are not clear, but his patron Kírillos V was no longer patriarch and it seems that Voúlgaris’ modern approach to education offended the conservatives among the Mt Athos monks. But the years had not been wasted. Voúlgaris had taken over, from the previous incompetent head, only some 70 students and perhaps as few as 20, but by the end of his time the number was almost 200. And in a valedictory and somewhat bitter letter to Kírillos V he claimed that there were ‘large numbers of men whom I enlightened to the best of my ability and who are now making their appearance and being heard in so many communities, and those others who soon will be appearing and will be heard’.
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In the rest of his long life Voúlgaris never again either taught or lived in the territory of today’s Greece. After his time on Mt Athos he taught at the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople from 1759 to 1762, but this post too ended in disputes, particularly with the then patriarch. From Constantinople Voúlgaris went to Halle and Leipzig where he arranged for the publication of his works. In 1772 he became librarian at the court of Catherine the Great of Russia and later an archbishop in the Ukraine. In 1781 he retired to a Russian monastery, where in 1806 he died at the age of 90.
As well as being a teacher, Voúlgaris was a prolific writer and produced a dozen or so substantial books. These were either direct translations of Enlightenment works, by Voltaire and others, or Voúlgaris’ own compilations of their ideas. The subjects covered logic, metaphysics, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. His own book
Logic
, which he used as his teaching textbook, gives a good indication of what influenced his own thinking and how he wished to influence those he taught.
The
Logic
is a massive work of 586 pages. It is divided into a long introduction on philosophical thinking followed by five parts, on ideas, thought, method, judgement and a final part on more general topics. The discussion is detailed and dense. Ideas, for example, are presented as changes of state, since new ideas change our view of the world. Voúlgaris maintains that there are three sources of these idea-changes. The first is God through revelation and is outside the scope of philosophy. The other two, following Locke’s ideas, are reflection – the source of judging and remembering – and reflection coupled with sensation, which enables us to think about cause and effect, pleasure and pain. Other Enlightenment thinkers besides Locke – Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz and others – are extensively quoted or referred to in the
Logic
, as well as Aristotle and Byzantine writers. This must have been extremely tough fare for Voúlgaris’ minimally educated pupils on Mt Athos – yet they flocked there in increasing numbers.
There were further barriers to learning for these pupils. One was that the
Logic
from which Voúlgaris taught was written in pure Ancient Greek, in his view the only possible medium for philosophical ideas. The resources of the popular language were, he said, mere ‘philosophical wordlets’, and ‘those booklets which profess to philosophise in the vulgar tongue are to be hooted off the stage.’
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Another difficulty was that during Voúlgaris’ teaching career all his writings, including the
Logic
, were available only in manuscript, and their later printing was all done abroad: the
Logic
was printed in Leipzig in 1766, most of his other works variously in Vienna, Venice or Moscow in the early 1800s. So the circulation of Greek texts in Voúlgaris’ time had not advanced since Stephen Gerlach acquired the manuscript of a patriarchal history two centuries earlier, and it was impossible for Greek education to make significant advances without widely available printed texts.
The two strands of Voúlgaris’ thought – philosophical enquiry and acceptance of divine revelation – never sat easily together. He rejected as ‘the merest suppositions’ theological explanations in physics to explain the attraction of bodies. On the other hand, he rejected the astronomical system of Copernicus because it was ‘against the pages of Scripture’. Perhaps his aspirations to rise in the Church hierarchy tilted the balance in favour of revelation, as in 1768 he maintained that ‘In the divine and mysterious dogmas of the faith, freedom of thought is brazenness.’
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As we shall see, the antagonism between the Church and the Enlightenment became increasingly overt and fierce.
