eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Opening with the birth of the Greek nation-state, which emerged from encounters between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Roderick Beaton carries his story into the present moment and Greece’s contentious post-recession relationship with the rest of the European Union. Through close examination of how Greeks have understood their shared identity, Beaton reveals a centuries-old tension over the Greek sense of self. How does Greece illuminate the difference between a geographically bounded state and the shared history and culture that make up a nation?
A magisterial look at the development of a national identity through history, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation is singular in its approach. By treating modern Greece as a biographical subject, a living entity in its own right, Beaton encourages us to take a fresh look at a people and culture long celebrated for their past, even as they strive to build a future as part of the modern West.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226673882 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 488 |
| File size: | 34 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
East Meets West?
1718–1797
The Greek nation state would be born out of a series of encounters between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, from whose body it would literally be torn. These began during the period of relatively peaceful co-existence between these traditionally embattled adversaries.
Ottoman expansion into Europe had come to an end with the second siege of Vienna in 1683. However, peace did not break out immediately. The Austrians and the Venetians would each fight two more wars against the Ottomans, and the Russians one, before a relatively stable, defensible and more or less mutually agreed set of boundaries would be established to mark off Muslim Turkey from Christian Europe. These boundaries were consolidated by the Treaty of Passarowitz, signed between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in July 1718.
To the west, the Adriatic and Ionian seas marked the limits of the Ottoman Empire. To the north, natural boundaries were formed by the river Danube, from Belgrade where its course turns eastwards, and then by the Black Sea into which it flows. On the European side of each of these three natural barriers lay three buffer zones, or borderlands. The first of these was formed by the seven Ionian islands to the west of the Greek peninsula, from Corfu in the north to Cerigo (ancient and modern Kythera) in the south. The second consisted of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia to the north of the Danube. The third was made up of the northern shores of the Black Sea and their hinterland. In each of these borderlands, Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians occupied elite positions and enjoyed the benefits of wealth and education. It was in these borderlands, too, that the first interactions between East and West took place.
BORDERLANDS
In the Ionian islands, Venetian rule had been established in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade and was still continuing. In the eighteenth century, conditions there remained very much as they had been in Venetian Crete until the Ottoman conquest, completed in 1669. Indeed many Cretans of the upper classes, who had had a stake in the Renaissance-inspired culture of their native island, had since found refuge there. Almost everyone permanently settled in the islands by this time professed the Orthodox faith and spoke the local dialect of Greek in daily life. But the official language was Italian. Sons of the aristocracy were sent to be educated at schools and universities in Italy. In this way, Western ideas began to filter through to the better-off sections of society during the course of the century. This education was generally available only to the landed gentry, so it was not especially likely to lead to ideas of revolutionary change. The primary loyalties of educated Ionians during the eighteenth century were to their native island, to the Orthodox Church and to the Most Serene Republic of Venice.
The second borderland, the 'Danubian principalities' of Wallachia and Moldavia, today forms part of Romania. Here, there was no significant Greek-speaking native population. Most of the inhabitants were Orthodox Christians who spoke the Latin-derived language that we know today as Romanian and was then called 'Vlach' or 'Wallachian'. The Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 confirmed Ottoman sovereignty, but not direct rule. Instead, the sultans appointed trusted proxies, 'princes' drawn from the wealthiest and most highly educated of their Orthodox Christian subjects established in Constantinople. This metropolitan elite was a kind of quasi-aristocracy that had grown up in the service of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. For that reason its members became known collectively as 'Phanariots', from the name of the district of the city where the Patriarchate was (and indeed continues to be) housed. Irrespective of their mother tongue, all these people had been educated in the Greek language. In that sense the Phanariots could be thought of as 'Greek', even though in modern, 'ethnic' terms many were not.
Increasingly, from the late seventeenth century, this group came to be trusted with important offices of state in the Ottoman system, especially those involving a knowledge of languages and a high degree of education. In an age when expansion by military means had given way to the new art of diplomacy, there was a need for a suitably qualified corps of diplomats. Often given the title of dragoman, or 'interpreter', these versatile linguists who were also Orthodox Christians became increasingly embedded in the Ottoman system of governance through the course of the eighteenth century.
For a little over a hundred years, from 1711 until the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821, with only brief interruptions during times of war, Moldavia and Wallachia would be ruled by a succession of Phanariot princes. Competition for these offices was intense, and reigns tended to be short. None of his successors would last as long as Nikolaos Mavrokordatos, who after a short period of office in Wallachia and another in Moldavia, settled down to eleven years of undisturbed rule in Bucharest, the capital of Wallachia, from 1719 until his death in 1730.
Just as the Greek-speaking aristocracy of the Ionian islands was continuously and unproblematically loyal to Venice, so the overwhelming majority of Phanariots throughout the eighteenth century identified with the Ottoman state. Indeed, such was the extent of their ascendancy, and so great the trust placed in them, that for Orthodox Christians the standard route to preferment within the Ottoman system, by the second half of the century, had become the Greek language and the educational institutions organized by wealthy Phanariots and the Orthodox Church.
The third borderland consisted of the Crimea and parts of today's Ukraine. This one does not enter the story until the beginning of the 1770s. From 1768 until 1774 the Russians and the Ottomans were at war. The Russians won, and as a result gained control of the coast and hinterland north of the Black Sea. The same conflict brought disruption to the Danubian principalities, which for the duration passed under Russian control, and devastation to the Peloponnese and some of the islands of the Aegean. At the end of 1769, for the first time, a Russian fleet from St Petersburg sailed via the Straits of Gibraltar into the eastern Mediterranean. A half-hearted attempt by the Russians to induce their Greek-speaking co-religionists to rise up in their support sparked rebellions in the Peloponnese and Crete. When the Russian fleet withdrew, these were easily crushed. The Orlofika, as these events are known in Greek (after the Russian admiral Count Orloff), are often remembered as a kind of protonational revolution. But self-determination for the Christian inhabitants of the Peloponnese or the islands was never on the table. If the revolts had succeeded, and if the promised military support from Russia had materialized, the local populations would only have exchanged one foreign master for another.
A more significant consequence of the war was the way in which Russia, under Catherine the Great, chose to populate and administer the newly gained territories north of the Black Sea, which at this time came to be named 'New Russia'. Beginning around 1770, the Russian state embarked on an ambitious programme of resettling there the families of Orthodox Christians who had been displaced from their homes in the Ottoman Empire by the fighting. It is estimated that as many as a quarter of a million Ottoman Christians were encouraged to migrate to 'New Russia' during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
By the end of the century, a large proportion of the trade carried on in southern Russia, across the Black Sea and up the Dnieper river was in the hands of these Greek-speaking subjects of the tsars. Positions of responsibility in the Russian government and army were thrown open to talented members of this immigrant population. It was during the same period, and on Catherine's initiative, that the new towns of Mariupol and Sevastopol were established, with transparently Greek names. The port cities of Odessa on the Black Sea and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov grew up during the same period. Both had large Greek-speaking populations. Catherine and her ministers, during the 1780s, even drew up a grand plan that would have reestablished the Christian Orthodox Byzantine Empire with its capital at Constantinople. Had the plan succeeded, it would have left no room for an independent Greek nation state. But by 1792, at the end of yet another war with the Ottoman Empire, although Russian gains had been considerable, it was clear that the Ottoman capital was not for the taking. The plan was quietly abandoned.
Once again, as in the Danubian principalities, the Greek elite in the new territories of southern Russia were incomers from the Ottoman Empire. But this time they were not a ruling elite. Their newly acquired wealth and status derived from the entrepreneurial skills fostered by Catherine's policies. This was not an aristocracy but a middle class. In other respects, it functioned like its counterparts in the other two borderlands. This was a group that had every reason to owe its primary loyalty to the state that supported it and made its activities possible – that is to say, in this case, to Russia.
Finally, during the second half of the eighteenth century, a fourth 'borderland' would open up in which Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians could interact with western Europeans. This, unlike the previous three, was not a single space, and not literally situated near a frontier. Rather, it consisted of a series of local communities established by merchants and traders in ports and trading centres across the Christian continent: Venice, Vienna, Trieste, Livorno, Marseille, Paris, Amsterdam. (Others, further afield, would come later.) These scattered Greek-speaking communities were the pioneers of what would later become a worldwide Greek 'diaspora'.
This development, too, was very much a consequence of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–74, although it had begun even earlier. The treaty of Küçük Kaynarci, which brought that war to an end, allowed new trading privileges to Ottoman Christian merchants, who were now entitled to some degree of nominal protection by Russia. But there was an important difference between the merchants newly settled in Russia and those who set up trading centres in the west. In 'New Russia' the Greek trading communities had been brought there and been helped to prosper as a result of a deliberate policy. In the west the same thing was happening quite spontaneously in many different centres. It follows that the communities in western Europe were apt to be politically more independent-minded than their counterparts in Russia – or, for that matter, than the aristocracy of the Ionian islands or the Phanariots in the Danubian principalities. Perhaps predictably, it would be among these communities of merchants in western Europe that the most active preparations for a revolution would come to be made – although not until the very last years of the century.
CROSSING BORDERS: PEOPLE, IDEAS, GOODS ON THE MOVE
These, then, were the four borderlands where interaction between Christian Europe and the Muslim empire of the Ottomans took place during the eighteenth century. In each of them, Orthodox Christians who spoke Greek occupied elite positions.
Individual members of these elites were extraordinarily mobile, and not only along the trajectories that might have been expected: Ionian islanders to and from Venice, Phanariots between the Danubian principalities and Constantinople, settlers and merchants between their new homes and their native provinces. A glance at the careers of some of the most famous of these men reveals a remarkable mobility, at a time when travel over long distances was invariably slow and uncomfortable, sometimes also hazardous. Take the case of Evgenios Voulgaris. Born into an aristocratic family in Corfu in 1716, Voulgaris went on to study, write and teach at Arta in Epiros, Venice, Ioannina, Kozani, the self-governing Orthodox monastic community of Mount Athos, Salonica, Constantinople, Jassy (capital of Moldavia) and the German city of Leipzig. From there, now under the patronage of Catherine the Great, Voulgaris went on to become one of the first Orthodox bishops to be consecrated in the 'New Russian' lands north of the Black Sea. His last years were spent at Catherine's court at St Petersburg, where he died at the age of ninety. In this way Voulgaris's restless progress encompassed in turn each of the three borderlands between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as European centres such as Venice and Leipzig, the Ottoman capital itself and several of its provinces in southeast Europe.
The world through which people like Voulgaris moved in the eighteenth century has been characterized in the twenty-first century as an 'Orthodox commonwealth'. That is to say, a sense of commonality was based on a shared religion and a shared education in the Greek language. This 'commonwealth' had no single geographical centre. Its heartland could be described as the southeastern corner of Europe, known today as the Balkans, but it was sustained by links deep into Russia in one direction and into Anatolia and parts of the Middle East in the other. Under its umbrella came together a broad mix of peoples who would later go on to forge distinct and often competing national identities of their own: Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldovans, Ukrainians and (some, but not all) Albanians, as well as Greeks. The collective identity of this 'commonwealth', loose though it was, was capable of transcending the different political loyalties of the different elites of the borderlands.
There are two transforming achievements associated with this commonwealth during the eighteenth century. One of these is the development of education, along with the circulation of printed books in modern Greek and the dissemination of secular learning adapted and translated from the West. The other is the expansion of trade. Both have been seen, from the perspective of later national history, as precursors that paved the way for the Revolution of the 1820s. But it is not as simple as that.
What has come to be known as the 'Greek Enlightenment' was essentially a process of dissemination of ideas eastwards and southwards from France, Britain and the German states, with gathering momentum during the second half of the century. Much of what was published, or circulated in manuscript, consisted of translations or adaptations, particularly of scientific and philosophical works. It is worth asking how enlightened were these 'enlighteners'. It is only in retrospect that they have acquired this name, since the 1940s. Most of them believed that the sun revolves around the earth, as their Church still taught. The first exposition of the physics of Galileo and Newton in Greek, ironically enough, and suitably hedged about, comes from a future bishop of the Russian new territories, Nikiphoros Theotokis, in a book published in Leipzig in 1766. It was not until very late in the century that anyone writing in Greek began to question the truth of revealed religion, or criticized the Church as an institution – and even then only rarely. This was in marked contrast to the Enlightenment in France. Indeed, very many of these 'enlighteners' were themselves in some form of holy orders – unsurprisingly, since the great patron of these early advances in Greek education in the eighteenth century was the Orthodox Church itself. When it came to politics, some were reformers and many were interested in political theory. But none was in any sense a democrat, still less a revolutionary.
Exemplary, in many ways, for those who came later, was Nikolaos Mavrokordatos, whom we met earlier as one of the first, and the longest-reigning, among the Phanariot princes of Wallachia and Moldavia. His father had been educated abroad, in Italy; he himself was unusually little-travelled. Like his father, in addition to his native modern Greek, Nikolaos was proficient in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian. To these, late in his life, he added Hebrew. As a ruler he introduced to southeast Europe the model of the 'enlightened despot', overhauling the ancient feudal system and encouraging the foundation of schools. Mavrokordatos was truly a philosopher-prince. Among his surviving works are a book of maxims, written in response to the more famous ones by the seventeenth-century French nobleman La Rochefoucauld. He was also the author of a treatise on the art of ruling. Essays by Mavrokordatos praise books and reading, and condemn the vice of smoking. A long disquisition on contemporary manners has been hailed by some as the first 'modern Greek' novel.
If there was ever truly a Greek 'Enlightenment', it made no original contribution to philosophy or science. These pioneers may not have made any detectable contribution to the Europe-wide movement. But they did make one very important discovery, one that would come to make an enormous impact within their own sphere. This was the discovery of themselves.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Greece"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Roderick Beaton.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Photographic AcknowledgementsList of Maps
Names, Dates and Titles
To the Reader
Introduction: The Nation and its Ancestors
1. East Meets West? (1718–1797)
2. A Seed is Sown (1797–1821)
3. Born in Blood (1821–1833)
4. First Steps (1833–1862)
5. Ideals and Sorrows of Youth (1862–1897)
6. Military Service (1897–1913)
7. The Self Divided (1913–1923)
8. Starting Over (1923–1940)
9. Meltdown (1940–1949)
10. Uncle Sam’s Protégé (1949–1974)
11. Coming of Age in Europe (1974–2004)
12. Midlife Crisis? (2004–)
Notes
Sources and Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
