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Turkish Crete
by enslavement or confiscation of property for quite minor offences.
This great divide of faithful and infidel cut right across racial
barriers; a Greek convert to Islam was at once, and automatically, one
of the chosen, able to bully and oppress his old co-religionists and compatriots.
Hence the multitudinous apostasy in Crete. Not only in Crete,
of course; but on a much greater scale in Crete than in, say, the Morea.
Pashley compares Sicily under the Saracen conquest, where ‘such was
the docility of the rising generation, that 15,000 boys were circumcised
and clothed, on the same day with the son of the Fatimite Caliph’.
The Cretan peasants could not afford to remain. Christian; as more and
more turned to Islam, the burdens on the remaining Christians must
have become correspondingly more crushing. But curiously it was the
Muslim philosophy itself which ensured that Christianity should never
be ruthlessly and systematically persecuted; for as time passed the
Muslims saw that they were dependent on a hard core of Christians for
their taxes. A world-wide universal House of Mohammed was a noble
and inspiring conception; but it would entail burdens on the followers
of the Prophet which fell now only on the infidel.
The apostates were the bane of Crete. They are often called Turks,
which adds to the confusion of Cretan history of these times. The evil
was rife even in Tournefort’s time.
The Turks throughout the island are mostly renegadoes, or sons of such: the
true Turks, take ‘em one with another, are much honester men than the
renegadoes. A good Turk says nothing when he sees a Christian cat swine’s
flesh, or drink wine; a renegado shall scold or insult ‘em for it, tho’ in private he
will eat and drink his fill of both. It must be confessed, these wretches sell their
soul for a pennyworth; all they get in exchange for their religion, is a vest, and
the privilege of being exempt from the capitation tax, which is not above five
crowns a year.
Tournefort may be right in deprecating the advantages of conversion;
but only in those early days. The more renagadoes there were the more
insolent and oppressive they became, so that by 1821 the Christian
peasant was worse off than at any other time in Cretan history.
The Christians naturally had a hearty dislike for the renegadoes, and
an extreme hatred of the Muslim faith. It was Muslim practice, in war,
to kill prisoners. The Christians did the same. When Nicephorus
Phocas recovered Crete for the Byzantine empire in 961, the inhabitants
of Candia were butchered; and Theodosius the Deacon praises the
Emperor Romanus II for his fatherly care for the souls of his own flock,
in that by this massacre he prevented the pollution of his soldiers by
unbaptized women. Hartley in his Researches in Greece reported that
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