The survival of the Greek nationality did not depend on any efforts of the Greeks themselves.  They were indeed no longer capable of effort, but lay passive under the hand of the Turk, like the paralysed quarry of some beast of prey.  Their fate was conditional upon the development of the Ottoman state, and, as the two centuries drew to a close, that state entered upon a phase of transformation and of consequent weakness.

The Ottoman organism has always displayed (and never more conspicuously than at the present moment) a much greater stability and vitality than any of its oriental predecessors.  There was a vein of genius in its creators, and its youthful expansion permeated it with so much European blood that it became partly Europeanized in its inner tissues—­sufficiently to partake, at any rate, in that faculty of indefinite organic growth which has so far revealed itself in European life.  This acquired force has carried it on since the time when the impetus of its original institutions became spent—­a time when purely oriental monarchies fall to pieces, and when Turkey herself hesitated between reconstruction and dissolution.  That critical period began for her with the latter half of the seventeenth century, and incidentally opened new opportunities of life to her subject Greeks.

Substantial relief from their burdens—­the primary though negative condition of national revival—­accrued to the Greek peasantry from the decay of Ottoman militarism in all its branches.  The Turkish feudal aristocracy, which had replaced the landed nobility of the Romaic Empire in Anatolia and established itself on the choicest lands in conquered Europe, was beginning to decline in strength.  We have seen that it failed to implant itself in Krete, and its numbers were already stationary elsewhere.  The Greek peasant slowly began to regain ground upon his Moslem lord, and he profited further by the degeneration of the janissary corps at the heart of the empire.

The janissaries had started as a militant, almost monastic body, condemned to celibacy, and recruited exclusively from the Christian tribute-children.  But in 1566 they extorted the privilege of legal marriage for themselves, and of admittance into the corps for the sons of their wedlock.  The next century completed their transformation from a standing army into a hereditary urban militia—­an armed and privileged bourgeoisie, rapidly increasing in numbers and correspondingly jealous of extraneous candidates for the coveted vacancies in their ranks.  They gradually succeeded in abolishing the enrolment of Christian recruits altogether, and the last regular levy of children for that purpose was made in 1676.  Vested interests at Constantinople had freed the helpless peasant from the most crushing burden of all.