Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (22 page)

To almost everyone the
beratli
were soon an anomaly, if not a disgrace. French merchants in Salonica resented their consul making wealthy Livornese Jews honorary Frenchmen, especially as they often decamped to another nation if offered better terms. But the Livornese—the last in the series of Jewish migrations into the city from the
Catholic West—had built up powerful trading houses, dominating the lucrative tobacco trade with Italy, and the consul was not about to lose their goodwill if he could help it. “In this port,” wrote one, “the treasury of the French nation would suffer a significant loss if the Jews, who do big business, were obliged to leave their protection.”
¹²

Many
beratli
demanded exemption from Ottoman taxes: they had, after all, paid large sums to acquire their favoured status. But in this way, despite being among the richest men in the place, they simply increased the tax burden upon their co-religionists. Thus their assertion of European untouchability did not go down well and it is not surprising that they made themselves unpopular. Community leaders sometimes connived with Ottoman officials to have them imprisoned or beaten up. Nightwatchmen knocked their European hats off their heads. When Greek
beratli
started to flaunt their status by wearing expensive woven belts and silks, bishops introduced new sumptuary laws. The newly arrived Livornese Jewish
francos
shocked traditional Jews with their wigs, frock coats and goatees, and rabbis in Salonica and Livorno hotly debated the proper length and shape of beards; some
beratli
were excommunicated for trimming theirs too fine. “These newcomers are dressed like the Franks,” wrote a Jesuit missionary in the city. “They have only a moustache not a beard; they do not mind eating with Christians; thus the others regard them only as half-Jews and almost as having deserted the Law.”
¹³

The Ottoman officials themselves had little sympathy for these upstarts. When a wealthy Greek merchant, Alexios Goutas, turned out to be working for the Venetian consul while claiming English protection, they queried his entitlement to both. Goutas asked to keep his English protection but to pass on his Venetian
berat
to his brother-in-law, and this was eventually done. In fact, the Ottoman authorities at the start of the eighteenth century had been most reluctant to encourage the spread of the consular system, precisely because they feared the abuse of the
berats
, and the consequent drop in their own tax revenues. As a result, they tended to sympathize with local men whenever quarrels arose. In 1732 there was a row between two Livornese
beratli
under French protection and one of the most powerful Jews in the city, Jacob Kapon, who was the pasha’s money-lender and chief treasurer. Kapon got the rabbis to excommunicate his rivals, so that their goods were left untouched by the local dockworkers; all the French consul’s protests failed to result in his punishment.
¹⁴

In the longer run, however, the
beratli
were unstoppable for they
had the prestige of Europe behind them. They were a new power in the city, middle-men between the local Jews and Frankish traders, and soon they were not only assisting European merchants but giving them a run for their money. Among the Jews, it was chiefly the Livornese who profited from the expansion of trade after 1718. A certain Raphael Villareal—whose relatives lived in Livorno and Marseilles—bought a ship, named with admirable
chutzpah
the
Archange-Raphael
, and hired a French captain: this was the kind of competition which frightened French exporters. But there were also men like “Don” Asher Abrabanel, a member of one of the most distinguished Sefardic families in the city and a man who had inherited “houses filled with luxury … immense wealth and property.” Abrabanel was a leader of the local Jewish community and responsible for the provision of cloth for the janissary corps. From 1738, Jewish
beratli
were attending consular ceremonies, a striking indication of their relative power vis-à-vis the city’s Christian merchants, who were shocked to receive them on equal terms, and the English consul was careful to send congratulations on the eve of the Jewish New Year.
¹⁵

Yet the rise of the Greeks threatened to put even the Livornese in the shade. After nearly three centuries on the margins, Salonica’s Greek community was reasserting itself. Greeks were rising to high positions in the Ottoman service, where the most successful became
voivodes
of Wallachia, or interpreters (
dragomans
) to the Imperial Fleet; others were powerful tax-collectors around Salonica itself. Hellenized Vlachs from the Pindos mountains traded in tobacco with Vienna, Venice and Trieste, building substantial frescoed mansions which can still be seen in the towns of Jannina and Siatista. With unrivalled connections with Leipzig, the Danubian Principalities and Russia, what one historian once called the “all-conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant” was quick to seek out new opportunities. Russia’s rise under Catherine the Great brought a powerful new protector, interested in the Balkans as never before. “Humble, crafty, intriguing and bold” as the French consul described them, the Greeks became an unrivalled force in Salonican commerce.
¹⁶

T
HE
R
ISE OF THE
G
REEK
M
ERCHANT

B
Y SEA THE
G
REEKS
were already making their entrepreneurial spirit felt, becoming successful freebooters and privateers.
Starting with the Seven-Year War (1756–63) between England and France, Greek corsairs embarked on an illustrious career in the Eastern Mediterranean that would last nearly a century. Flying English colours, the
angligrecs
preyed on French shipping, while the Ottoman authorities turned a blind eye. The same thing happened in the American war of 1778–83. In between, they participated in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74 on the Russian side. Corsairs had always been a nuisance—or rather, part of the Mediterranean maritime economy: Algerians, Tunisians, Dulcigniotes, Maltese, Venetians and other Italians, not to mention the English themselves, had all flourished. But none of them found it easy competing in the second half of the eighteenth century with the Greeks, who were drawn from the impoverished islands of the Aegean and the Adriatic, and adjusted easily to the seasonal nature of professional piracy. During the 1770 Russian campaign, Greek pirates from the islands entered the Gulf of Salonica in armed
caiques
, forcing the imperial grain levy for Istanbul to be sent the long way round along the muddy inland roads. Fifty years later, they were more of a nuisance than ever, not least to their own fellow-Christians. “The troubles and misfortunes that have befallen us and continue now for ten days … we cannot relate,” wrote three unfortunate Greek victims in 1827. “Beating us and binding our hands, and with cutlasses threatening us that if we did not confess where we had our money they would take our lives with all that they had already taken from us, all our possessions, and they have left us in our shirts.”
¹⁷

With some reason, the Porte associated European merchants with piracy, and accused the
beratli
of more than once sharing their profits with them. The lines between legal and illegal trading were always a little blurred at sea. Nevertheless, it was surely a sign of the Greeks’ growing prosperity that alongside their piratical activities, they were also increasingly involved in legitimate commerce. In the summer of 1776, an Austrian aristocrat, Baron Starhemberg, tried to set up a large new trading company in the Ottoman lands—the German trade was by far the fastest growing partner for the Levant. His agent arrived from the capital on a boat under a Russian flag, captained by a Greek from Smyrna and crewed by Greeks and Ragusans, to buy tobacco from local Greek merchants and ship it to Trieste for the Austrian and north Italian markets. The Venetian consul was understandably worried and passed on the news to his masters: Starhemberg, he reported, planned to monopolize the export of tobacco and cotton in particular not only to “Germany” but also to Italy. The implications for Venice’s traditional predominance in the Mediterranean scarcely needed to
be spelled out: “A new flag, the Russian, will come into the harbour, which on the one hand is much more attractive to the fanatical Greeks, and on the other will attract Barbary pirates into the Gulf.” But in fact, it was worse than that: the local Greeks soon realized they did not need the Austrians at all, for they were already running the Vienna trade effectively enough without them. Heavily laden caravans of between one hundred and one thousand horses, well-guarded, were regularly making the thirty-five-day journey by land to the Austrian domains.
¹⁸

Under the protection of the Russian flag, which they enjoyed since the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, Greek merchants supplanted the Jews who had dominated the carrying trade with Venice, and established a network of trading houses between Odessa, Alexandria and Marseille. Men like the tobacco and cotton exporter Andronikos Paikos or “the most illustrious Signor Count Dimitrios Peroulis” paved the way. Their new wealth brought them prominence and allowed them to live in a new style: by the end of the century, the firm of one of the wealthiest Greek merchants, Ioannis Youta Kaftandzoglou, was reputedly the largest in all Macedonia: he supported the publication of scholarly and religious books (mostly in Vienna), and married into the family of a local French trader. Even though he himself was under the protection of the Prussian consul, he was concerned enough about the finances of the Greek community to take action against other
beratli
who were refusing to pay their taxes, and as a result he managed to get the community’s tax arrears paid off.
¹⁹

This was the kind of attitude appreciated by the Ottoman authorities. In return, they allowed the centrally located church of Ayios Minas, which had burned down many years earlier, to be rebuilt and later the churches of Panagouda and Ayios Athanasios too. Orthodox Christians were also moving into larger houses, previously owned by Turks. But this was still a sensitive business. When a Greek Venetian
beratli
called Georgios Tsitsis bought a mansion in the centre of town previously owned by a former
mufti
, he took the precaution of obtaining a positive religious opinion, or
fetva
, issued by one of the
mufti
’s successors. Even so, he later ran into trouble with a new pasha who insisted it was against the Qur’an for an unbeliever to live in the house once inhabited by a
mufti.
²⁰

T
HE GROWTH OF RUSSIA
offered the Ottoman Greeks more than just prosperity and new trading opportunities. After the string of defeats suffered by Venice in the seventeenth century, the rise of
a Christian Orthodox power also carried the promise of liberation and redemption from the Turks. Greek monks spread the “Russian expectation” from the time of Peter the Great. “The Greeks are persuaded,” a French Jesuit observed in 1712, “that the Czar will deliver them one day from the domination of the Turks.” Apocalyptic visions foretold the downfall of the empire at the hands of “another Lord, another Macedonian, the monarch of the Russians,” in the words of the most popular of these, a collection of prophecies known as the
Agathangelos.
The author, a Greek monk, saw “Christ’s victorious banner over Byzantium” and predicted that “then all will be milk and honey. Truth will triumph. And the heavens will rejoice in the true glory. The Orthodox faith will be raised high and spread from East to West.”
²¹

In this climate of expectation, Catherine the Great realized how useful it might be to play to the Balkan Orthodox audience, and to present her self-styled “Greek project”—as the Russian march south was termed—as the revival of Byzantine imperial glories. The 1768–74 war left the Ottomans worried at the bond of sympathy they discerned between the Russians and the Greeks. In December 1768, they ordered the Christians of Salonica and the surrounding region to hand over all their arms. In 1770, as Russian agents fomented Greek uprisings in the Peloponnese, some Muslims in Salonica were sufficiently worried to contemplate killing or driving the Greeks out. But in fact cooler counsels prevailed, with the result that the janissaries grumbled that the
mollah
and
mufti
were “pro-Greek,” and attacked their residences, destroying them and carrying off their possessions. So long as the war lasted, and especially after the crushing Russian defeat of the Ottoman navy off Chios, the Christians of Salonica feared massacre.
²²

The following year, the Eastern Mediterranean was still filled with rumours of imminent salvation. In April 1771, it was reported that on Paros there were Greek and Albanian troops under canvas, serving alongside the Russians. They had built a church there and the former Patriarch Serafeim had celebrated Good Friday mass before departing for Mount Athos. After the service he had blessed the Russians and prayed for their victory, warning them not to accept offers of peace but to continue fighting “until the Greeks had been freed from the heavy Ottoman yoke.”
²³
Salonica again lay at the mercy of the Russian fleet. Nevertheless, the Russians, despite all the rumours, did not come, the fleet sailed past Athos without entering the Gulf, and when peace was concluded in 1774 the only losers were those few Ottoman Greeks who had been tempted to take up arms in the hope of Russian support.