Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (29 page)

Finally, Grosrichard’s book also points to the way in which all political systems are based on a fantasy. The ruler’s power always depends on the symbols of power. For Montesquieu this symbol was the ruler’s name: ‘The inhabitants of those countries need only the name of a prince to govern them.’
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Charles XII of Sweden reduced the power of symbols to absurdity by telling his senate that he would send one of his boots to command them. The descriptions of a society as totalitarian or as liberal are merely ‘two interchangeable languages to describe the same deception, off which every variety of political power lives’.
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One can conclude that the fundamental flaw in the Ottoman system of government was that the Sultan had absolute power of life and death but did not rule, while the grand vizier ruled but could lose his office and his life at the Sultan’s whim. Such a skewed division of power was, of course, common in medieval courts. What was unique about the Ottoman system was that the skew was so pronounced and persisted for so long.

Underlying most of the failures of the Ottoman system was the weakness of the Ottoman economy, which can most obviously be traced in the progressive debasement of the Ottoman coinage. Debasement was the Ottoman response to the inflation that hit Europe as well as the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. This inflation was partly due to population increase, and partly – some argue mainly – a result of the huge imports of silver to Spain from the silver mines of Spanish America. Thanks to these mines the world output of silver by the 1550s was some six times what it had been at the beginning of the century.

The basic Ottoman coin, minted from an alloy of silver and base metals, was the akche, known as the asper in Europe, both terms meaning white. As the value of the akche declined, higher value coins were introduced: in 1624 the piastre, worth three akches, and in 1690 the kurush, worth 40 piastres and therefore 120 akches. Debasement can be traced by following the silver content of the akche and its larger equivalents.

The silver content of the currency was relatively stable between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and 1585, but the following century saw a rapid fall in silver content, from 680 milligrams per akche in 1584 to 230 in 1683, a fall of two thirds. There was a further reduction of two thirds between 1690 and 1790, and yet another, of over half, by the 1820s. Catastrophic as this might seem, debasement averaged just under one per cent a year throughout the whole life of the Ottoman Empire between 1326 and 1922, fairly low by twentieth-century standards but
high compared with other contemporary European states, especially the Ottomans’ commercial and military rival, Venice.

With debasement of the coinage went devaluation, the progressive fall of the value of the Ottoman currency against other currencies. A marker is provided by comparison with the Venetian gold ducat, stable because it had virtually unchanging gold content. In 1453 there were roughly 40 akches to the ducat, and the figure was still much the same in 1590. But the following centuries brought big increases in the rate of devaluation, as of debasement. By 1690 the ducat cost not 40 akches but 105, and by 1790 the figure was 235, rising to 350 by the time the Venetian republic came to an end in 1797.

In theory devaluation should benefit a state’s trade balance, through the mechanism known as the J-curve. After devaluation, exports become cheaper and in time increase, but imports become immediately more expensive: initial result, deficit – the downward curve of the J. But in time the volume of exports increases because they are cheap, and domestic consumers buy fewer of the expensive imports: result, surplus – the J’s upward stroke.

However, this mechanism can work only in a reasonably open market economy, and the Ottoman state operated a largely command economy, hedged with government restrictions on exports, especially of war matériel and grain, and with government controls on prices. The economies of western Europe, often called mercantilist, were designed to develop industry and encourage exports. By contrast the Ottoman economy was operated with two main purposes: to finance the army and to maintain the Sultan and his palaces. In the Ottoman budget of 1669–70, which showed a deficit of over seven per cent even at that time of relative peace, pay for the army of nearly 100,000 men accounted for a third of all expenditure, and related army costs almost another third. Revenue for the Sultan’s person and his palaces, including in one year nearly 100 tons each of raisins and sultanas, accounted for almost all the rest – just under 30 per cent, an astoundingly large amount even in the days of lavish expenditure in European courts. This left little money available for other uses: the navy six per cent, construction two per cent and civilian administration a mere one per cent.
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This makes clear that at the root of the weakness of the Ottoman economy were the demands of the army. Increasing numbers of troops – janissaries and mercenaries – had to be paid in cash, rather than living off their estates as the timar-holders had done. Throughout the life of the empire wars were almost continuous in Europe to the west, in Iran and Iraq to the east, in Egypt and Syria to the south, and latterly against Russia
to the north. Wars of expansion, bringing potential new wealth to the empire, ended with the acquisition of Crete in 1669. From then on wars were holding operations, and the frontiers on which they were largely fought were now a long way from the army’s base in Constantinople. The empire had been founded on the principle of expanding conquest, but the expansion had reached its limits. And in any case it is broadly true that, as Fernand Braudel succinctly said, war is a waste of money.
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How were the Greeks affected by this creeping weakness of their Ottoman rulers? One very obvious result was that war came to the territory of mainland Greece for the first time since the original Ottoman conquests of the fifteenth century. In the war of 1683–99 between the Ottomans and the Holy League led by Austria and Venice, the Venetians took the Peloponnese and held it until driven out by the Ottomans in 1715. In 1770 the Russians briefly occupied, with Greek support, some of the main Peloponnesian fortresses. But these upheavals were relatively short lived. More pervasive were the effects of a major development of the late seventeenth century: the progressive introduction of tax farming.

Tax farming was the Ottoman response to the problem of how to channel the resources tied up in timars to the central treasury. The timars were by now supporting a traditional cavalry that was deficient in almost every way: it was needed less, it was less available to serve, and less effective when it did so. The process involved converting the timars to private holdings, imposing taxes on them, and then farming out the collection of these taxes.

The first step was to get rid of the timar-holders by not granting new timars of a viable size, and reclaiming existing timars for the state. Reclaiming was not difficult. The state was entitled to take back any timar whose holder failed in his military duties or who died without heirs, and all timars had always been technically state property.

The second step was to introduce tax farming. The tax farmer paid the bid price over to the treasury, and kept for himself all the taxes he collected. Alternatively, he might sell on the tax-farming rights at a profit to subcontractors, who then needed to be even more rapacious. Not surprisingly, tax farmers were unscrupulous in wringing the maximum, legally or otherwise, from their victims in order to realise their profit. The system had obvious advantages for the treasury. It received tax payments wholly in cash rather than partly in kind, and at the beginning rather than at the end of the tax-collection process. Also the state treasury did not have to provide its own body of tax-collecting officials. But the system became increasingly oppressive. Once it was known that a particular area was profitable, the tax-farming rights were sold for
ever-higher sums, requiring ever-harsher exactions from the peasants. There was a minor change for the better around 1700. From then on taxfarming rights were sold not for a few years at a time but for the lifetime of the tax farmer, thus giving him an interest in the long-term prosperity of the peasants. Nevertheless the spread of tax farming, it has been said, accounted more than any other cause for the disruption of the order that had formerly ruled in the provinces.

The tax farmers soon found ways of converting the area over which they had tax-farming rights into private estates, known as chiftliks. These were often large, though a chiftlik, like an English farm, could be of any size. First the current landholder, whether a timar-holder or a peasant with his own plot of land, needed to be dispossessed. This might be done ostensibly legally, with the connivance of the local judiciary, or by driving the peasants into debt at exorbitant rates of interest, or simply by force. The peasant then had a stark choice: either to remain as a labourer for the new landholder, subject to his arbitrary dictates and without any of the legal rights of the past, or alternatively to flee, to a settlement in the mountains or to join a band of brigands. The loss of workers was usually of no great concern to the chiftlik owner, since land was converted from growing crops to the raising of livestock, which needed much less labour and was much more profitable. It was said that ‘the sheep’s foot turns the sand to gold.’
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At the same time as control was slipping away from the centre into the hands of provincial elites, the tax burden on the peasants was increasing. The two main extraordinary taxes had initially been demanded only in times of crisis, usually military campaigns. One of these was in cash, the other largely in kind, as grain or other goods for the army on campaign or for fortress garrisons. These two taxes were at first collected occasionally and as alternatives, then they became simultaneous, both being now paid in cash, and finally they became annual taxes. At the same time the poll tax was steadily increasing, and in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire it quadrupled between 1574 and 1640.

All taxes, wrote Edward Gibbon, must at last fall upon agriculture, and the corollary is that taxes can destroy agriculture. In the Ottoman case, as a later historian has put it, ‘The classes that lived on dues and taxes were engaged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on a long-drawn-out strangling of the unfortunate geese that laid their golden eggs.’
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15

Hunger and Disease

T
he main Ottoman taxation of agriculture fell on grain, a tax payable originally in kind but later increasingly in cash. But other factors too affected the price of grain: good or bad harvests, of course, as well as the demands of the army on campaign, and grain shortages elsewhere, as in Italy and Spain in the mid-sixteenth century, which pushed up the price of grain in the Ottoman Empire. Also grain was requisitioned from the provinces to feed the population of Constantinople. The quantities involved were enormous: in 1700 the capital needed 500 tons of wheat a day and the city’s bakers had to hold a three months’ supply. What grain was left for the provinces therefore became more expensive.

In statements by historians about grain crops, production levels and prices, it is not always clear what crop is meant. Wheat has throughout history been the most important grain in the Mediterranean, including Greece. It is the best for making bread because it is rich in gluten, and the higher the gluten content the lighter, the more porous and the more digestible the bread produced. Rye is more usual in northern Europe and is little found in Greece. Maize is common in Greece. It does not have enough gluten for bread making, but is rich in protein, and is often used for animal fodder. Barley, like maize, is common in Greece but cannot produce bread, and as a food source it is often added to soups or stews. Oats, a highly adaptable crop, are in Greece mainly used for animal feed. Greek grain production in 1975 gives an indication of the relative importance of different grain crops: wheat over half the total, barley a quarter, maize fourteen per cent, with small amounts of oats and rice making up the rest.

Kóstas Kostís, in his book on food crises in Greece during the Ottoman period, includes tables of wheat prices in the Balkans as a whole. These show much greater variation than the average wheat prices for Europe generally. European prices roughly doubled on a steadily rising curve between 1540 and their peak in the seventeenth century and then settled at a slightly lower level. By contrast the average Balkan wheat price was much more volatile. It multiplied around ten times between 1695 and 1725 and, having fallen back to its previous level, rose by a similar factor
between 1780 and 1810. Average Balkan prices for all grain crops taken together varied even more. In 1710–14 it was fifteen times higher than its level only a few decades earlier, and in 1720–4 it was over 50 times that level, before again dropping back. Very often, and especially at these times of huge price fluctuation, Greeks of both town and country would have been in a continual state of uncertainty and anxiety about whether they could afford, or even obtain, their next meal.

Sometimes a link can be seen between prices and good or bad harvests. In the Thessalonika area there was a poor harvest in 1739, though even in October a unit quantity of wheat cost only a little over one piastre. But by December 1739 the price was five piastres, and by May 1740, shortly before the next harvest, had risen to 25 piastres. However, the 1740 harvest was a good one and the price fell back to its original one-piastre level throughout the following winter. Expectations could multiply this effect: if a poor harvest was anticipated, grain for sale would be held back in the hope of higher prices later. But this gamble did not always pay off, as Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, even in the more predictable conditions of Victorian Dorset, found to his cost.