Part 3

The Seljuks, who were bent chiefly on gaining new pasturing grounds, seem to have drawn the Greek population closer to themselves and to have made them of some service, instead of attempting to drive them out by force. This is proven by the accounts of voluntary or forced submission to the conquerors, into which the inhabitants were driven by the unsound agrarian conditions in Asia Minor, which were characterized by an ever-growing tendency toward larger and larger estates, a tendency against which, even in the 10th century, the clear-sighted emperors had vainly enacted the strictest laws. The consequences appeared at the time of the inroads of the Seljuks; evidently with full knowledge of these conditions, they promised the oppressed peasants in the conquered regions complete freedom in return for the payment of a head tax, if they would yield to their control. Thus great masses of the Greek population went over to the Turks and were lost to Hellenism. Emperor John Comnenos, on one of his campaigns against the Seljuks of Iconium (1120), was forced first to fight bitterly with the Greeks of that region, who had either been already half Turkified, or were, at any rate, strongly Turcophile. We see, then, that at that time large intermixtures of the native Greeks (or of the Hellenized native population) with the Seljuks must have taken place, for only through such intermixture is the fact to be explained that the Anatolian population of today, both Christian and Mohammedan, instead of showing a distinct racial stamp, rather presents strongly modified features which cannot be described as either Aryan or Mongolian.[17]

The Ottomans were less bent on peaceful assimilation than on forcible subjection and extermination. In their character as masters they sought to make the conquered as harmless as possible, and they used to this end a means that they had learned from the Byzantine emperors; they transplanted, from the conquered cities that had a large Greek population, large numbers of these Greeks to other cities where the Greeks were less numerous, so that everywhere the Greeks were forced into a minority. Furthermore, the Greeks were no longer permitted to live in the large cities that were at that time still strongly walled, but were compelled to settle outside in the suburbs. From these suburbs there gradually developed later, as the Greek population increased, entirely new towns, which crowded the old city-center from its predominating position and established itself in its place. This system, as we shall see, resulted in strengthening rather than weakening the Greek element. And yet, in this Turkish conquest, a great part of the Greeks in the towns were constantly being forced to leave Asia Minor and to take refuge in the European part of the Empire, for the Byzantine historians of that time (the 14th century) tell of mass emigrations to Europe, of homeless refugees crowded in and around Constantinople, and of growing insecurity in the neighborhood of the capital. This exodus from the towns betokens a second essential difference as compared with what had happened in the Balkan Peninsula. While, in the Balkans, the cities appear as the supporting centers, the bulwarks, of the Greeks against the Slav inundation, forming a base of operations for winning back the open country that had become Slav, in Asia Minor not only the country regions but the towns as well fell into the hands of the conquerors, evidently because the Turks were better trained soldiers and more familiar with the art of besieging towns than were the Slavs, who were accustomed only to campaigns in the open. The degree to which the Greek communities of Asia Minor suffered under the Turkish conquest is shown by the old Church Acts which are still preserved in the Patriarchate in Constantinople.[18] While Asia Minor before the Turkish invasion counted no less than fifty seats of Metropolitans (the highest church dignitaries) it has today only twenty.[19] Of these, twelve alone are distributed in the western provinces, while the other provinces have only eight. Even of these the greater part are maintained only for the sake of the names. These numbers show better than anything else how seriously the Greek town-population in the interior of Asia Minor melted away as a result of the Turkish conquest, for every withdrawal of the seat of a Metropolitan, and every uniting of several such seats in one, presupposes a decided decrease in the population of a district.

The greatest direct losses of the Greeks were caused by the two great Mongolian invasions of the years 1241 and 1402, especially the latter under the much-feared Timur. These hordes found their only joy in burning, murdering and pillaging, and poured forth like a plague of locusts “in separate bands over Galatia, Phrygia, Bithynia, Paphlagonia, the coast region of Caria, Lycia and Pamphylia in such a way that it seemed as if the whole Tartar army was billeted in every separate province, so numerous were they.” So says one of the last Byzantine historians (Dukas), who pictures also, in vivid colors, the consequences of this predatory incursion in the words, “Timur left neither living men, nor weeping children, nor barking dogs, nor crowing cocks, but everywhere nothing but the stillness of death.” Thus every one of these three Turkish inundations had in its own way contributed to decimate the Greek population of Asia Minor.

Only in two greater districts have compact groups of Greeks of considerable extent preserved their nationality, their speech and, in part, their religion, that is, in Middle Cappadocia, in the interior of eastern Asia Minor, and in Pontus, in the extreme northern coast region; in the former as a relic of the old church settlements and in the latter as the last remains of that latest Greek effort at establishing a state in Asia Minor, the Empire of Trapezus. The Greek population of these two districts can therefore serve to bring clearly before us the Asia Minor Greeks of the Middle Ages, in their physical as well as their linguistic character.

Before proceeding further I must state that these peoples, like those of the Balkan Peninsula, must already have acquired their present physical stamp in the early Middle Ages, at any rate, before the Seljuk-Turkish conquest, for the modified, ethnically but slightly distinguished type of the western Anatolian peasant population is not characteristic of these Greeks. Rather do the Cappadocian Greeks show unmistakable Armenian influence, especially in the broad and extraordinarily high skull, and the large fleshy nose, as well as in their compact and sturdy build, while those of the mountainous coast region of Pontus have retained the more finely cut features of the Greeks and their more graceful form. Some claim to find a third type in the Greeks of south-eastern Asia Minor, a type which shows strikingly Semitic features, and which is probably to be traced back to the numerous Syrian immigrations into Asia Minor during the supremacy of the Isaurian Dynasty of Byzantium, 717-867. In the same way the Armenian type of the inland Greeks is to be traced back to the extensive intermingling of Byzantine Greeks and Armenians during the 9th and 10th centuries, when the Byzantine Empire received a strong quickening of Armenian blood. A dynasty of Armenian origin at that time gave the Byzantine imperial throne a new hold and lent renewed strength to the new kingdom and a great Byzantine province of Asia Minor was called “the Armenian Province.” In any case, we must be on our guard against deriving our present ethnographical picture of Asia Minor directly from the old racial divisions into Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians. The fact that Asia Minor served as a bridge between Asia and Europe prevented such a preservation of the old ethnical relations, as had been the case in the Balkan Peninsula, that great reservoir of people in migration; here as there, in judging of ethnological characteristics, we should, far more than has up to now been the case, start out from Byzantine times, which completely transformed the ancient ethnological nature of both peninsulas.[20] That we have to do, however, in the case of the Cappadocian and Pontic Greeks with autochthonous remains of pre-Turkish times, and not with later immigrants, is shown not only by their racial type but by their dialect. This belongs to the very oldest forms of the Modern Greek language, if one leaves out of account the still more ancient Tzakonian, and enables us to conclude that it broke away from other Greek at a very early period, and followed a separate development of its own. This is particularly true of the Pontic dialect of Samsun (Amisos), Œnoe (Unieh) and Ophis; there is in the phonetics of the dialect, as well as in the vocabulary, so much that is peculiar that it is almost unintelligible to those conversant with the ordinary Modern Greek. But this holds true also of the dialect of some twenty Cappadocian towns—for with only twenty are we here concerned—a dialect which is still quite on the level of the Greek of the early Middle Ages, evidently going back to the time of the settlements in the country of the old monks, which can be proved, in the region of Cæsarea, to go back in many cases as far as the 4th century B.C. These dialects,[21] however, are, as compared with those larger and continuous regions where common Greek is spoken, only small and distinct islands of the Greek speech, which are constantly wearing away and giving up ground, more and more, although the proportion of Greeks in these regions is much higher than elsewhere. The ratio is highest in Pontus, where there are nearly 250,000 Greeks (25 to 30 per cent of the population), and where they form a large percentage even of the city population, especially in Trebizond and Samsun. On the contrary, in Cappadocia they are to be found settled only in a large number of villages, comprising altogether something like 40,000 souls.[22] The number of these Greeks in Pontus as well as in Cappadocia is, furthermore, all the harder to fix accurately, because there are among them many communities of Christians who conceal the fact that they are Christians, and, for political reasons, pass as adherents of Islam (even making use of the Turkish language), but who are really devoted to Christianity and have kept up their Greek national feeling. In Pontus they are especially to be found in the districts of Tonia and Ophis, where in the seventies of the last century they were estimated at about 14,000, while in other districts, as in Krom and Torul, a strong process of Christianizing them anew has taken place.[23]

Apart from these two isolated areas of Greeks, the Turks have inundated the whole peninsula, subjecting it to the Turkish nationality and to the Turkish language, while Hellenism, though not entirely destroyed, has been so seriously broken up and shattered that it has been obliged to give up even its language and its religion, that is to say, has completely lost its national consciousness. The numerous Greek names of rivers, villages and mountains have, with very few exceptions, all disappeared, being replaced by Turkish names.[24] As far as administration and ways of living were concerned, the Turkish conquest produced very few radical changes. The very towns which under Greek control had formed commercial and administrative centers, continued to be such under the Turks, keeping, for the most part, their old Greek names as a proof of the strength of 1500-year-old traditions. Towns like Smyrna, Prusa, Pergamon, Magnesia, Attalia, Adana, Tarsus, Iconium, Ancyra, Cæsarea, Amasia, Castamuni, Trapezus, Sinope, Amisos and others experienced a new quickening under their old names, which the Turks altered only slightly. Not only did they continue to be the capitals of their various districts for purposes of administration, but their names were extended so as to apply to the entire districts of which they were centers. Practically all the vilayets and sanjaks of Asia Minor received their names from these old centers of city-civilization and comparatively few have Turkish names, the ancient Tralles, Philadelphia and Dorylæum, for example, bearing the Turkish names Aïdin, Alashehr and Eskishehr respectively. On this weighty point, therefore, the Turks, as an unhistoric people, have been as little able to interrupt the continuity of civilization as in the Balkan Peninsula, where the larger towns likewise have kept their Greek names.

Just as the Turks in Asia Minor have taken over the way of living of their predecessors in power, so too have they accepted almost unchanged their social relations. Two points alone deserve special mention here, the possession of large landed estates and the feudal system. The Turkish landowners, the Beys, are nothing but the direct successors of the Byzantine archontes, and the Turkish peasants have been forced to render compulsory service to the Beys just as the Christian peasants did to the archontes. That strongly developed feudal system, too, which has existed from Byzantine times, especially ever since the 11th century, with its distinction between the little and large fiefs for foot soldiers and cavaliers, respectively, was taken over by the Turks, and was by them even more highly developed.

In this accommodation to the conditions and institutions of the subject peoples did the strength, as well as the weakness, of the new masters consist: in so far as they found before them fast-bound customs, which they simply took over, they were obliged to accept, along with their advantages, their drawbacks as well. The only real advantage that they received came from their acceptance of feudalism, while the retention of cultural and social conditions in town and country was bound gradually to weaken their power, because these conditions either outlived them or, at any rate, were not suited to them. The first statement applies to agrarian relations, and the latter to commercial relations in the towns. This free shepherd and peasant race (for this they had previously been) lost its free character through taking over the Byzantine provincial nobility without, however, in doing this, developing a genuinely urban civilization, which is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for trade-activity. Thus the Turkish peasantry went backward without a Turkish bourgeoisie arising. At any rate, only a limited town-folk arose which made its living by handicraft but did not know how to conquer economically the regions that it had subdued politically. There existed here, therefore, a twofold, dangerous breach in the social organism of Mohammedanism, and into this breach sprang the ever-alive and ever-enterprising Greek, first the Greek trader, and then the Greek farmer. Both had in the west coast of Asia Minor and in the islands, regions where Greeks have always lived, a field for their activity that, though at first modest, has slowly but steadily broadened out.

In the first place, Greek trade in Asia Minor was destined to have an awakening. The impulse to this came from the trade policy inaugurated in the Levant by Colbert, the gifted Minister of Louis XIV. A special trade-society was founded for this purpose (1664), the consular system was reformed, French merchants were united in permanent corporations and a state system of control was arranged between the most important harbors of the Levant and Marseilles. An interesting account has been preserved, dating back to the year 1733, which tells of measures taken to increase the trade of Smyrna as over against its rival Constantinople, and one from the year 1778, containing a regulation decided upon by the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce for the French merchants of Smyrna.[25]

The number of firms there that represented French houses had, in the period from 1752 to 1783, already increased to twenty-nine as against eleven in Constantinople and eight in Salonika. This French trade-policy was systematically based on a strengthening of Smyrna, with the evident purpose of driving the rival trade of Italy out of the field. In this it must have succeeded, for in the forty years from 1750 to 1789 the value of French goods imported from Smyrna to Marseilles rose from 5,629,000 pounds to 12,805,000 pounds and, at the same time, the export from Marseilles to Smyrna rose from 4,250,000 pounds to 9,500,000 pounds. This increase in the trade of Marseilles naturally postulated a similar increase in the trade of Smyrna; this attained even in 1787 no less a figure than 52,750,000 Turkish pounds, in which figures is included the rapidly increasing trade with Russia which resulted from the latter’s position as Turkey’s protector since 1774. Smyrna thus became a new and important reloading place in the trade of the Levant, and although, at the beginning of the 18th century, it had numbered hardly 30,000 inhabitants, it had, in the year 1803, 100,000, of whom about a third were Greeks. The new blood was mostly to the advantage of the Greeks. In fact, one may say that the new enlargement of Smyrna, which had formerly been the center of Hellenism in Asia Minor and became so in an increasing degree from now on, opened a new period of prosperity to the Greeks of Asia Minor; from all parts of the Greek Orient a stream of enterprising Greeks gathered together here, so that the old capital of Ionia soon became once more an almost purely Greek city; in 1850, of about 125,000 inhabitants, 60,000 were Greeks, in 1880 of about 160,000, 75,000 or 80,000 were Greeks, and in 1910, over 100,000 inhabitants of the city’s 225,000 were Greeks. On the contrary, the number of Turks has, in the last 100 years, dropped from 75,000 to 60,000, or, according to some authorities, to 50,000, while the number of Greeks has almost quadrupled.[26] The trade of Smyrna has correspondingly increased, especially since the opening up of the interior through the railroads that go out from Smyrna into the valleys of the Hermos and Mæander. Though the trade in 1839 amounted only to 53 million francs, it had increased in 1855 to 120 million, and by 1881 had even reached the figure of 220 million francs. It had already surpassed the commerce of Constantinople, and the Turks therefore call Smyrna too, mingling envy and scorn, “the infidel Smyrna” (Giaour Ismir). For Hellenism in Asia Minor, however, it became a new and firm support for its interests and a source of prosperity. Even in the year 1818 the Greek merchants of Smyrna were able to build at their own expense a beautiful casino, intended alike to serve business and social ends. This proved, however, to be a tender blossom that had come out prematurely and was soon destroyed by the storms of the Greek War for Independence (1821-1829), though it did bloom forth all the more strongly after the war’s fortunate ending.

For Hellenism began to spread over the west coast in a large number of little places, which were in part old Hellenic sites, and in part places settled during the Middle Ages, or in later Turkish times. Among the very old sites is Phocæa, which through a strange play of circumstances has formed the beginning and the ending of a development that has embraced the world. Famous as the metropolis of Marseilles (Massilia), it was, after a long period of decay, revived in modern times by the reflux movement from her daughter of old, a movement that affected Smyrna first, and then its neighbor Phocæa as well, for this too, in spite of its changing political fortunes, had always been a bulwark of Christianity and was again destined to experience a new, though modest, rejuvenescence. Although, during the first half of the 19th century, the Greeks there were still in the minority, as compared with the Turks, constituting two-fifths of the population (2,000 out of 5,000), the relation has in the intervening decades so changed that now out of 8,000 inhabitants, 6,000 are Greeks, so that these now form three-quarters of the inhabitants. This increase is due to the vigorous local shipping trade which centers here and which numbers annually something like 3,000 ships. The most remarkable thing is, however, that this rejuvenated Old Phocæa has already become once more the mother-city of a young Phocæa (New Phocæa), which is about ten kilometers northwest of the old and although only a few decades old already has about 5,000 inhabitants of whom about 4,000 are Greeks. New and Old Phocæa then, taken together, already number about 10,000 Greek inhabitants as compared with 3,000 Turks. Working the salt pits and exportation of raisins constitute the chief sources of livelihood of the two cities.

The two other important harbors north of Smyrna are, like Phocæa, of recent origin and are therefore purely Greek; I mean Dikeli and Aïvali. Dikeli may really be described as founded by the German archæologist Karl Humann, who in 1869 had the road that led to this place from Pergamon rebuilt, in order the better to transport the Pergamene sculptures excavated by him. Enterprising Greek merchants have taken advantage of this road in the exportation of the products of the country, and have built up here a trading place which in 1880 had 3,000 exclusively Greek inhabitants but which now contains 5,000 such.[27] Owing to this fact the older harbor of Chandirli, situated more to the north, has steadily diminished in importance. The chief exporting harbor of northwest Asia Minor is, however, Aïvali, newly built in the third decade of the 19th century on the site of an older Greek settlement named Cydonia, a name which, like Aïvali, means “quince.” It is an almost unique example, on Asia Minor soil, of a large, purely Greek and practically self-governing community, with 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, a yearly export business of ten to twelve million francs and a shipping of over 3,000 vessels. It has thoroughly modern business institutions as well as a Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture and an Agricultural Bank. It is the seat of three consular agents, those of England, France and Italy. Through Aïvali’s growth the ancient Adramit (Adramyttium), which was formerly on the coast but is now further inland away from the bay, has been put into the background and now contains about 6,000 inhabitants. As compared with these three ports, the three that are situated on the west coast, south of Smyrna, are by no means so important, perhaps just because they are older settlements, in which Hellenism has had to force its way against the Turks, who were here numerically superior. This is particularly true of Chesme, which lies on the projecting west point of the peninsula of Clazomenæ.[28] It is a town of about 6,000 inhabitants, which prospers through its raisin trade. The Turks, to be sure, form the majority of the population (about two-thirds), but the shipping (2,500 ships annually) is entirely in Greek hands. The chief place of export for the products of the Mæander valley is Scalanova, settled in the Middle Ages and named by the Turks Kush-Adassi, by the Greeks New Ephesus. The Greeks, 3,000 to 4,000 in number, are constantly forcing the Turks, who are settled in the old walled town and are about equal to them in number, further into the background, and in commerce they completely control the field. Lastly, Budrum, a Turkish settlement on the site of the ancient Halicarnassus and still inhabited by about 3,000 Turks, has become Hellenized in proportion as the growing importance of the place as a center of export for southwest Asia Minor—the ancient Caria—has been appreciated by the Greeks. Their number, which twenty years ago was a little over 2,200, may since then have come to equal that of the Turks, or may even have surpassed it.