Ousted from the towns, the Greek race depended for its preservation on the peasantry, yet Greece had never suffered worse rural oppression than under the Ottoman regime.  The sultan’s fiscal demands were the least part of the burden.  The paralysing land-tax, collected in kind by irresponsible middlemen, was an inheritance from the Romaic Empire, and though it was now reinforced by the special capitation-tax levied by the sultan on his Christian subjects, the greater efficiency and security of his government probably compensated for the additional charge.  The vitality of Greece was chiefly sapped by the ruthless military organization of the Ottoman state.  The bulk of the Ottoman army was drawn from a feudal cavalry, bound to service, as in the mediaeval Latin world, in return for fiefs or ‘timaria’ assigned to them by their sovereign; and many beys and agas have bequeathed their names in perpetuity to the richest villages on the Messenian and Thessalian plains, to remind the modern peasant that his Christian ancestors once tilled the soil as serfs of a Moslem timariot.  But the sultan, unlike his western contemporaries, was not content with irregular troops, and the serf-communes of Greece had to deliver up a fifth of their male children every fourth year to be trained at Constantinople as professional soldiers and fanatical Moslems.  This corps of ’Janissaries’[1] was founded in the third generation of the Ottoman dynasty, and was the essential instrument of its military success.  One race has never appropriated and exploited the vitality of another in so direct or so brutal a fashion, and the institution of ‘tribute-children’, so long as it lasted, effectually prevented any recovery of the Greek nation from the untimely blows which had stricken it down.

[Footnote 1:  Yeni Asker—­New soldiery.]

2

The Awakening of the Nation

During the two centuries that followed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Greek race was in serious danger of annihilation.  Its life-blood was steadily absorbed into the conquering community—­quite regularly by the compulsory tribute of children and spasmodically by the voluntary conversion of individual households.  The rich apostasized, because too heavy a material sacrifice was imposed upon them by loyalty to their national religion; the destitute, because they could not fail to improve their prospects by adhering to the privileged faith.  Even the surviving organization of the Church had only been spared by the Ottoman Government in order to facilitate its own political system—­by bringing the peasant, through the hierarchy of priest, bishop, and patriarch, under the moral control of the new Moslem master whom the ecclesiastics henceforth served.

The scale on which wholesale apostasy was possible is shown by the case of Krete, which was conquered by the Turks from Venice just after these two centuries had closed, and was in fact the last permanent addition to the Turkish Empire.  No urban or feudal settlers of Turkish blood were imported into the island.  To this day the uniform speech of all Kretans is their native Greek.  And yet the progressive conversion of whole clans and villages had transferred at least 20 per cent. of the population to the Moslem ranks before the Ottoman connexion was severed again in 1897.