At the same moment the contemporary tendency in western Europe towards bureaucratic centralization began to extend itself to the Ottoman Empire.  Its exponents were the brothers Achmet and Mustapha Koeprili, who held the grand-vizierate in succession.  They laid the foundations of a centralized administration, and, since the unadaptable Turk offered no promising material for their policy, they sought their instruments in the subject race.  The continental Greeks were too effectively crushed to aspire beyond the preservation of their own existence; but the islands had been less sorely tried, and Khios, which had enjoyed over two centuries[1] of prosperity under the rule of a Genoese chartered company, and exchanged it for Ottoman sovereignty under peculiarly lenient conditions, could still supply Achmet a century later with officials of the intelligence and education he required, Khiots were the first to fill the new offices of ‘Dragoman of the Porte’ (secretary of state) and ‘Dragoman of the Fleet’ (civil complement of the Turkish capitan-pasha); and they took care in their turn to staff the subordinate posts of their administration with a host of pushing friends and dependants.  The Dragoman of the Fleet wielded the fiscal, and thereby in effect the political, authority over the Greek islands in the Aegean; but this was not the highest power to which the new Greek bureaucracy attained.  Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century Moldavia and Wallachia—­the two ‘Danubian Provinces’ now united in the kingdom of Rumania—­were placed in charge of Greek officials with the rank of voivode or prince, and with practically sovereign power within their delegated dominions.  A Danubian principality became the reward of a successful dragoman’s career, and these high posts were rapidly monopolized by a close ring of official families, who exercised their immense patronage in favour of their race, and congregated round the Greek patriarch in the ’Phanari’,[2] the Constantinopolitan slum assigned him for his residence by Mohammed the Conqueror.

[Footnote 1:  1346-1566.]

[Footnote 2:  ‘Lighthouse-quarter.’]

The alliance of this parvenu ‘Phanariot’ aristocracy with the conservative Orthodox Church was not unnatural, for the Church itself had greatly extended its political power under Ottoman suzerainty.  The Ottoman Government hardly regarded its Christian subjects as integral members of the state, and was content to leave their civil government in the hands of their spiritual pastors to an extent the Romaic emperors would never have tolerated.  It allowed the Patriarchate at Constantinople to become its official intermediary with the Greek race, and it further extended the Greek patriarch’s authority over the other conquered populations of Orthodox faith—­Bulgars, Rumans, and Serbs—­which had never been incorporated in the ecclesiastical or political organization of the Romaic Empire, but which learnt under Ottoman rule to receive their priests and bishops from the Greek ecclesiastics of the capital, and even to call themselves by the Romaic name.  In 1691 Mustapha Koeprili recognized and confirmed the rights of all Christian subjects of the Sultan by a general organic law.