free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
rapacious, and in regard they buy their places at Constantinople,
where everything goes by auction, they spare nothing to lick themselves
whole.’ In any case, a just pasha could hardly survive the pressure
exerted on him from below by the aghas and janissaries. It was they
who set the tone; if a pasha stood up to them they had him deposed, as
happened in 1819.
Below the pashas were the landowners; beys who owned great
estates, and perhaps commanded one of the garrisoned fortresses, and
the aghas who owned the numerous small fiefs formed out of lands
taken over from the Venetian noble feudarchs and the Latin church.
It was they, and the janissaries, who ran Crete.
The janissaries are important, As founded in the fourteenth century,
they were a corps of troops recruited from Christian children only.
One boy from every Christian family might be snatched away to be
brought up as a Mohammedan member of the Sultan’s bodyguard.
These tribute-children were a kind of praetorian guard. The tribute of
children stopped in the seventeenth century, so the Cretans never
suffered from it. But the janissaries, mercenary, arrogant and undisciplined,
continued to be the military trustees of empire. It must be
remembered that in theory all the Turks belonged to some military
body.
Since all land belonged to the Sultan - with rare exceptions such as
the island of Chios which belonged to the Sultana-Mother - every
proprietor had originally to buy his fief from the Grand Signor. The
purchaser could not then be dispossessed, and the land could be given
in bequest. But a heavy tax was payable on it every year. Thus, as
under the Venetians, the peasant producer was supporting his conqueror.
The burden fell, ultimately, on the lowest class. In return for
the taxes paid in cash and in kind the Christians received almost
nothing in the way of public services, roads built, communications
improved; at best, the slothful indifference of the Turks allowed them
usually to conduct their own affairs, to educate their children in the
customs of their ancestors for the coming of freedom.
The history of Crete under the Turks is the history of her revolts;
sung by folk poets, by novelists like Kazantzakis and Prevelakis;
regarded by the mountain Cretans as the natural state for the palikari
(hero). As with the revolts against Venice, not all merit the telling.
There is a uniformity in blood and heroism that in the end fatigues.
Some years, however, cannot be ignored - 1770, 1821, 1866, 1897.
The first of these, 1770, the year of Daskaloyiannis’s revolt, is, together
with 1866 and 1941, the most glorious year of Cretan history.