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Turkish Crete
to copy an inscription at Gortyn the Turks gathered around and
insulted him to such a degree that he was obliged to give up and retire
until his janissary returned. It must have been a shock for Europeans
to discover that they were not safe from the arbitrary demands of the
pashas. When Ali Pasha, ‘that voluptuous minister’, was viceroy at
Megalokastro, he was troubled by a distemper which did not respond
to Greek treatment (syphilis). A visiting French dignitary recommended
an Irish surgeon he had aboard, and the Irishman put the
pasha in the powdering tub. At the height of the salivation, the great
man, thinking himself about to die, summoned his council and sentenced
the surgeon to have a hundred bastinadoes. The council
demurred and the pasha recovered. Thus the story ends happily; but
the unfortunate surgeon Teague gained such a reputation that he had
to spend nearly twenty-four hours a day in ‘ ’nointing the Mussulmans’.
Most of the pashas were rapacious. One having been given a rich
brocade vest by the French demanded another on the grounds that he
had two wives. ‘The toppingest lords think it no shame to beg.’
All this by the time of Tournefort’s visit, when Crete had been
Turkish for only thirty-one years (dating from the fall of Candia in
1669). In general, what can be said about one period of Turkish
domination can be said about another, for the Turks were at least
consistent in their extortion and indifference to reform; until 1821 at
any rate. If we see, then, the chief differences between Venetian and
Turkish rule we shall have a fair idea of how the island was administered
from 1669 to 1821.
The first difference we have seen: under the Turks the cultural and
artistic life of the cities Candia, Canea and Rethymon stopped. The
Ottoman Turks were nomad fighters, uninterested in the arts, cunning
to adopt the talents of their subject peoples in their own interests. Thus
Greeks were prominent in administration and trade throughout the
empire. But there was no need for art; and so the cultural centres of
Hellenism were Venice and the Ionian islands.
The second difference, and it is crucial, was over religion. Very rarely
– it happened once during the war of Candia – fanatics meditated the
extermination of Christianity throughout the empire. Usually how-ever
the Turks were much wiser. Since the fall of Constantinople the Turks
had used the patriarchy; Mohammed II, by engineering the election
of Gennadius II as patriarch and confirming his rights and privileges
as ethnarch of the entire Orthodox community, set a pattern which
lasted throughout Ottoman suzerainty. Certainly the Turks
manipulated the patriarchy; the office, like every other office in the
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