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- Herausgeber: Krill Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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THE CRETAN INSURRECTION OF 1866-7-8
William J. Stillman
OIA PRESS
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-7-8
By
William J. Stillman
The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-7-8
Published by Oia Press
New York City, NY
First published 1874
Copyright © Oia Press, 2015
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
About Oia Press
Opa! In many ways, the ancient Greeks formed the backbone of Western civilization, and they continue to fascinate millions across the globe over 2,000 years later. Oia Presspublishes all the influential and groundbreaking works produced by seminal figures like Aristotle and Plato, as well as critically acclaimed histories of Ancient Greece written by historians like George Grote.
INTRODUCTION
The Cretan Revolt was an uprising against the ruling Ottoman Turks starting in 1866. The revolt was eventually suppressed by 1869, as the Ottomans gave further rights to Christian Cretans for local rule.
This account of the Cretan Insurrection is authored by William Stillman, the U.S. consul in Crete at the time.
Preface
In committing to print the subjoined record of the Cretan revolt of 1866-7-8, I am fulfilling a duty in regard to a series of events which, if not in themselves of importance, are so as a revelation of the manner in which political influences work in the East, and perhaps still more as a curious exemplification of the weight which personal accidents, private intrigue and pique, and the capacity or incapacity of obscure officials, may have in determining the affairs of great empires.
In taking the position I did with reference to the insurrection, I was actuated only by a love of justice, and in no wise by sentimental or religious prejudices; but I hope it may be permitted me to say that, if I learned how fatal are the defects of the Greek race, its bitterness in personal rivalry, want of patriotic subordination, and the extravagance of its political hostilities, I saw also that it possesses admirable qualities, which the interests of civilization demand the development of; high capacity for political organization, for patriotic effort and self-sacrifice; and endurance and equanimity under misfortunes, which few races could endure and retain any character or coherence. Their amiable and refined personal qualities, and their private and domestic morality, have, justified in me a feeling towards them for which I was utterly unprepared on going to the Levant, and give me a hope that the manifest lesson of the Cretan revolt may not be lost in their future, either to them or to the friends of the better civilization. I feel that the Hellenes are less responsible for the vices of their body politic than their guardian Powers, who interfere to misguide, control to pervert, and protect to enfeeble, every good impulse and quality of the race, while they foster the spirit of intrigue, themselves enter into the domestic politics of Greece in order to be able to control her foreign, and each in turn, lest Greece should someday be an aid to some other of the contestants about the bed of the sick man, does all it can to prevent her from being able to help herself. No just and right-thinking man can make responsible for its sins or misfortunes, a people which is denied the right to shape its own institutions without a studied reference to the prejudices of its protectors; to manage its own affairs without the meddling of foreign ministers, who dictate who shall be its administrators; to protect even its own constitution against the violence and usurpation of an irresponsible and incapable head, without the secret but efficacious intervention of some foreign Power.
A witness of every step of the late diplomatic intervention in Greek foreign affairs, I saw that in all the corps diplomatique at Athens Greece had not one friend—every one helped to push her into the abyss; not one word of real sympathy or friendly counsel did she find from any foreign representative. The United States, which had, perhaps, more than any other nation a powerful moral influence, and could have helped her by wise words and calm and disinterested moral intervention, had chosen to send as the dispenser of that influence the most incapable, ignorant, and obsequious diplomat I have ever known in the service of our Government—a man who was an actual cipher in any political sense, and who, on arriving in Greece (our first representative there), hastened to mingle himself with the party intrigues of the country, ranging himself on the side of the king, against the people, in such a way that his advent was, to use the words of one of the leading statesmen of Greece spoken to me at the time, “like a wet blanket” to the hopes of liberalism in Greece.
The Hellenes must learn that they have no friends, save in the unprejudiced and charitable individuals who know them well enough to be able to overlook their foibles and petty vices, in view of the solid and genuine claims which they have to our liking and the support of Christendom. As one of those, I await the day when Greece shall have been mistress of herself long enough to prove whether or not she can govern herself wisely, before I lend my voice to her blame for her failures or her offences.
The Publishers feel bound to inform the reader that during the delay which has attended the publication of this work, several of the personages mentioned in it, and some whose character or conduct is severely criticized, have died. This explanation will relieve the author of the appearance either of bad taste or of vindictiveness; while to the fact that he was unable to give his personal supervision to the work in passing through the press are due the errata which may be discovered, and an occasional want of uniformity in the spelling of proper names.
New York, February 1, 1874.
INTRODUCTORY
A STUDENT OF CLASSICAL ETHNOLOGY, curious to restore the antique man, can do no better, so far as the Greek variety is concerned, than to go to Crete and study its people. The Cretan of today preserves probably the character of antiquity, and holds to his ancient ways of feeling and believing, and, within the new conditions, as far as possible of acting, more nearly than would be believed possible, and affords a better field of investigation into the nature of the classical man than any existing records.
The island is one of those paradisiacal isolations which facilitate civilization in its early stages, and preserve it from the encroachments of progress in the later. Its low latitude secures it against cold in winter, and its insular position against extreme heat, while the range of high mountains running longitudinally through it gives its climate a salubrity possessed by no section of the world’s surface so near the sun. The standard summer temperature is from 82° to 86° Fahr., and once only in a residence of nearly four years I saw it as high as 92º. The minimum was 520. Wild flowers never are wanting except in midsummer. The almond blooms in February (I have seen it in blossom on Christmas), and all the known fruits follow it in succession, each finding some locality and climate suited to it.
The fertility of the plains, and the inaccessibility of its mountain fastnesses, made prosperity easy and conquest difficult, while its remoteness from the shore of either continent, made ancient invasion not easy, and preserved the type of the composite Greek race from the barbaric innovations of Greece proper, so that we have the Greek race ofB.C. 700 undoubtedly more purely preserved than anywhere else.
Only in prosperity and weight in mundane matters, in comparative consideration, they have passed to the other end of the scale from that in which Homer could say of their land: “There is a country, Crete, in the midst of the black sea, beautiful and fertile, wave-washed roundabout, with a population infinite in number, and ninety cities. The races are different, and with different languages—there are Achaeans, there are the huger Eteocretans, the Cydonians, the crest-waving Dorians, and the divine Pelasgi. Theirs is Cnossos, a great city, and theirs is King Minos, who talked nine years with great Jove”.
This enumeration has evidently no relation to chronological order, and unfortunately we have no intelligible traditions as to the order of settlement in Crete. Diodorus Siculus says that “the first inhabitants of Crete dwelt in the neighborhood of Mount Ida, and were called the Idaean Dactyls”. But Scylax says that, according to early Greek tradition, Cydonia (in the western end of the island) was known as “the mother of cities”. Its position and character of site indicate rather a settlement of Pelasgi coming from the west.
Spratt finds in the geological record clear evidence of the Greek Archipelago having been formerly a fresh-water lake or series of lakes, and, if this be true, Crete must have been connected with the main lands of Europe and Asia Minor, in which case the aboriginal inhabitants would be a land migration, probably from Aryan sources. That a Phrygian colony known as the Idaean Dactyls brought here knowledge of certain arts and religious mysteries, and became to the people with whom they mingled, semi-divine, appears probable. The subsequent visit of the Tyrian Hercules, who, on his way to get the cattle of Geryon, called here as the rendezvous of his forces, and, to recompense the Cretans for their friendship, purged the island of wild beasts, may indicate a Phoenician colony or passing expedition.
But admitting, as of possibility, that the Eteocretan was a land emigration, cavern-dwelling, as the abundance of the caves in the island suggests; a collation of all the traditions makes it probable that the first important immigration was Pelasgic, and from the Italian shores, noted in many Greek traditions as the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi (Etruscans?), whose colonies came down by the Morea and the isles of Cerigo and Cerigotto by easy journeys to Crete. [The records of Karnack show that, in the reign of Thotmes III, a great migration of Cretan Pelasgi came into Egypt, and became the Philistines (Pilisti or Pilisgi); proving that at this early period the hive was so full that it had begun to swarm.]
This first immigration became, if my conjecture goes to the mark, the Cydonian stock—the subsequent one which Homer speaks of as Pelasgic, being of much later date; the Dorian, which was of the highest importance in its effect, as finally assimilating or subjecting all other races, and the Achaean, a scarcely influential influx, coming within the recognized traditions. The author of the “Isles of Greece” supposes two aboriginal races in the island, a needless multiplication of “original Adams”, though an Asiatic or Phrygian race coming in at the east, and a Pelasgic at the west, seem to have been the first recognizable elements in the population.
The myth of Jupiter and Europa is regarded as concealing the history of the introduction of the worship of the moon by a Phoenician colony, who, combining with the population of the eastern end of the island, whose peculiar deity was Jupiter, produced the race over which Minos came to rule, from this fabled to be the son of Jupiter and Europa. The journey of Europa along the river Lethe indicates the course of this colony to the capital of Minos, Gortyna, which more anciently had borne the name of Larissa, a Pelasgic name, from which we might conjecture that it was founded by the colony of Teutamos, who, with a band of Dorians, Achaeans, and Pelasgi, the builders of all the early Greek cities, is said by the early historians to have arrived in Crete three centuries before the Trojan war, and to have settled in the eastern part of the island, and given the early city its Pelasgic name.
The present inhabitants betray differences of character so great as almost to indicate difference of race. The Sphakiotes are larger of build, more restless and adventurous, thievish and inconstant, turbulent and treacherous, than the people of any other section. The Seliniotes, in the western extremity, are the bravest of the Cretans, but less turbulent or quarrelsome, not given to stealing, and of good faith. In the eastern end, especially the region of Gortyna and Cnossos, the blessings of the rule of Minos seem to rest in pacific natures. The great Dorian invasion, about 1,000 BC, gave the island, a dominant caste, uniformity of language and customs, but without complete fusion of races.
The language of Crete today is a Dorian dialect, and preserves many characteristics noted by the ancient authors. The use of Kappa as c is used in Italian, either hard or soft (in terminal syllables generally the latter), the use of r for l, especially with the Sphakiotes, and the presence of many words in modern Cretan which have disappeared from modern continental Greek, with a comparative rareness of Turkish words, and entire absence of Albanian and Slavonic, show how much less the Cretans have been affected by outside influences than other parts of the Greek community.
There is a trace of genuine Cretan literature, though its chief work, the “Erotókritos”, is by an Italian colonist, Vincenzo Cornaro. They have, however, many songs and many bards, though to any but Cretan ears the music is far from agreeable. I knew one of the popular singers, Karalambo, poet and singer at once, as most of them are (and many are improvisatori of considerable facility). He was so much in repute that no wedding or festivity was considered complete anywhere in the range of a day’s ride from Chania unless Karalambo was there; and at other times he used to sing in the cafes on the Marina, screaming, to the strain of a naturally fine tenor, songs which, though to me not even music, used to melt his audiences into tears. He was a patriot as well as poet, and when the insurrection of ‘66 actually broke out, his songs were so seditious, and excited the Khaniote Christians so much, that he was driven into the mountains, and, joining a band of his neighbors, was one day wounded by the accidental discharge of a pistol one of his comrades was cleaning. The wound was fatal from want of surgical attendance.
The Cretan music is always of a plaintive character, and monotonous; in singing, they have a habit of incessant quavering, and this, with the drawling tone, makes it far from agreeable to an ear accustomed to cultivated music, but it has a decided character of its own.
There were in Kalepa before the insurrection two improvisatori of considerable repute, who were accustomed to carry on musical disputes, one singing a couplet, and the other replying in a similar one. Sometimes it was a match of compliments, and sometimes the reverse, but following with tolerable exactitude the metre, a four-lined stanza, the second and fourth lines rhyming. All the ballads I have seen are in this form, the music also differing but little to my ear, though possibly to a Cretan there may be wide differences.
The Cretans possess, in common with all the Greeks, the avidity for instruction and quickness of intellect which make of this race the dominant element in the Levant. They are tenaciously devoted to their religion and to their traditions, which have kept them up and preserved the national character against such a continuation of hostile influences as probably no other people ever lived through. The history of Crete is a series of obstinate rebellions and barbarous repressions, since the first conquest by the Saracens in ad 820, a conquest which was followed by an almost complete apostasy from Christianity—sword-conversion, and by persistent attempts on the part of the Byzantine emperors to reconquer it, until 961, when Nicephorus Phocas succeeded in driving the Saracens out. They seem to have made no considerable addition to the Cretan stock, since the population rapidly returned to Christianity, to which, judging from the known and more recent past, they had always probably remained devoted at heart. At the division of the Byzantine empire, Crete passed to Boniface, Duke of Montserrat, and from him was purchased by the Venetian Republic, 1204, from which time till its conquest by the Turks, completed in 1669, the Cretans were under a yoke that would probably have depopulated any other section of the Old World. The cruelties and misgovernment of the governors sent from Venice would be incredible if not recorded by Venetian historians and official records. The Venetians seem to have regarded the Cretans much in the same light as the English colonists of America did the Indians, and, when their wretched state came to the knowledge of the Senate, they sent commissioners to examine into it, from whose reports I translate some extracts (quoted in Italian by Pashley), who, from the original documents in the public library of Venice. Basadonna, the first of these officers whose reports remain, says (1566) :
“The tax gatherers and others dependent on them use against these unhappy people, in one way and another, strange and horrible tyrannies. It would be a matter worthy of your clemency immediately to abolish so odious and barbarous exactions, since to maintain them is to abandon these wretched men to most cruel serpents, who lacerate and devour them entirely, or oblige the few of them who remain to escape into Turkey, following the footsteps of innumerable others who, from time to time, have gone away from this cause”.
Then from Garzoni (1586):
“In all the villages in which I have been, I have seen the houses of the inhabitants, in the greater part of which there is not be seen any article for the uses of dress or table; and for food, they are without bread or corn; they have no wine; their women are despoiled, their children naked, the men slightly covered, and the house emptied of everything, without any sign of human habitation. And this wretched people is compelled by established custom to give to the cavaliers two angarie [twelve days’ work] each per annum, and is obliged also by ancient regulation to work as much more as the cavalier may need for the pay of eight soldini a day, which amounts to a gazetta [two Venetian soldi, or about one penny] and a fifteenth, introduced by them two hundred years ago, and not since increased. They are obliged to keep chickens and hens according to the number of doors [I do not feel sure of having properly translated this expression, obscure in the original], their masters having applied the term of doors to houses, which are built by the peasants themselves, and have no kind of use of doors, because the Cavaliers, industrious for their own advantage, make doors as frequently as possible to increase the number of royalties. The beasts of labor, called donnegals, are obliged to plough a certain quantity of land, for which, planted or not, the peasant must pay the third. The donnegals are also obliged to work two angarie per annum. Mules and other beasts of transport must make two voyages to the city for the master. Animals of pasture the tenth, and a thousand other inventions to absorb all the productions of the land. If the peasant has a vineyard planted (the ground always belonging to the Cavaliers) and trained by him, although on land before wild, he must pay to the master, before marking the division for the royalty (which by ancient regulation gives one-third to the Cavalier and two to the peasant), five measures, called mistaches, for each vineyard, under pretext that he has eaten part before the vintage, for the use of the pattichier [in Crete, even now, an open shallow kind of vat built in the fields, of flat stones, and cemented, in which the grapes are trampled], and under other most dishonest inventions. And to increase still more the royalty, they divide the vineyard into so many parts that few return more than fifteen mistaches, in such a way that with fraud founded on force they take two-thirds for themselves and give one to the peasant.
“There are chosen for judges of their country, as I have said, Castellans—writers who serve as secretaries; and Captains to look after the robbers, who all set rapaciously to rob these poor people, taking what little any of them may have hidden from the Cavaliers under pretext of disobedience, in which the peasant abounds, by reason of his desperation, so that he is in every way wretched. The Castellans cannot by law judge the value of more than two sequins, although by some regulation they are allowed authority to the sum of two hundred perperi, about fourteen sequins; and because they have eight per cent, for the charges they make, all causes amount to two hundred perperi, however small it may be, in order to get their sixteen of charges, with thousand other inventions of extortion to eat up the substance of the poor. The Captains, whose name indicates their functions, have their use from robberies, and always find means to draw their advantage from the same, plundering the good and releasing the guilty, to the universal ruin. . . . The men chosen for the galleys are in continual terror of going, and those who have the means, with whatever difficulty, from some vineyard, or land, or animals, throw all away unhesitatingly for a trifling price to pay for their dispensation, which costs fifteen or twenty sequins—expense which they cannot support. The poorest, hopeless of their release, fly to the mountains, and thence, reassured by the Cavaliers, return to their villages, so much the more enslaved as they are fearful of justice, and by their example make the other villagers more obedient, attributing to the Cavaliers the power of saving them from the galleys... To which, add the extortions to which they are subjected by a thousand accidental circumstances, execution of civil debts, visits of rectors and other officers, to whom they are obliged to give sustenance at miserable prices.
So that the peasantry, oppressed in this manner, and harassed in so many ways, annoyed by the reasonings of the Papists, and made enemies of the Venetian name, ... are so reduced by the influences I have enumerated, that I believe I can say with truth that, with the exception of the privileged classes, they desire a change of government, and though they know they cannot fall into other hands than those of the Turks, yet, believing they cannot make worse their condition, incline even to their tyrannical rule”
I extract from the opinion of Fra Paolo Sarpi (1615), a more Jesuitical, and, it would seem, more palatable advice to the Senate, since it was, in the end, and to the end followed: “For your Greek subjects of the island of Crete, and the other islands of the Levant, ... the surest way is to keep good garrisons to awe them, and not use them to arms or musters, in hope of being assisted by them in extremity; for they will always show ill inclination proportionably to the strength they shall be musters of. ... Wine and bastinadoes ought to be their share, and keep good nature for a better occasion. . . . If the gentlemen of these colonies do tyrannize over the villages of their dominion, the best way is not to seem so see it, that there may be no kindness between them and their subjects; but, if they offend in anything else, it will be well to chastise them severely, etc. . . . And in a word, remember that all the good that can come from them is already obtained, which was to fix the Venetian dominion, and for the future there is nothing but mischief to be expected from them”.
What a pity that Sarpi had not lived before Dante, that he might have been niched in the “Inferno” :
Questo e de’ rei del fuoco furo.
I have only space to epitomize a passage of the history of Crete, under the Venetians, to show how utterly infamous, unjust, and devilish was their régime. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the provinces of Selino, Sfakia, and Rhizo seceded, and established an independent government, which was for some time unmolested by the Venetian authorities. The governor of the seceded republic finally presuming to ask in marriage for his son the daughter of a Venetian noble, the latter, to revenge the insult, plotted with the governor of Chania and, pretending to consent, lured the family of the soi-disant Greek governor, with a company of nearly 500 of his compatriots, to the marriage feast. The guests having been intoxicated and gone to sleep, and the signal given to the authorities at Chania, the governor came with 1,700 foot and 150 horse, took the whole prisoners, and in various ways and different places massacred them, except a few who were sent to the galleys.
This was followed up, for the better terrifying of the seditious, by a raid on the village of Foligniaco, near Mournies, and on the edge of the plain of Chania, in which they took the whole population prisoners asleep, burned the village, hanged twelve of the primates, ripped open three or four pregnant women, wives of the principal people, put to death and exiled the whole population remaining, except five or six who escaped. The Provveditore then called on all the Greeks of the lately revolted district to come in and surrender themselves, but, as they naturally declined, they were put under a ban which is perhaps the most horrible sentence ever given by a civilized community. No inhabitant of the proscribed district could secure his life except on condition of bringing in the “head of his father, brother, cousin, or nephew”
“At length a priest of the family of the Pateri-Zapa entered the city, accompanied by his two sons and by two of his brothers, each of the mournful party carrying in his hand a human head. (Of the five heads, the first belonged to the son of the priest, the second to one of his brothers, the third to his son-in-law, and the fourth and fifth to sons of one of his brothers.) The wretched men placed their bleeding offerings before the Signor Cavalli and the other representatives of Venice, and with the bitterest tears stated whose heads they were. The facts were duly established by witnesses; even the governor who had been sent to Crete to extirpate the seditious Greeks was moved, and the law was at length abolished”
This was under the auspices of Christianity. Under the Crescent, things were at first better, but finally such as to cause wonder how there is still a Cretan people, considering that even Dante could say :
“Nel mezzo ‘l mar siede un paese guasto
Diss’egli allora che s’appella Creta”.
The Venetian rule had reduced the population of the island to about 160,000, the tenth of its probable number under the Byzantine emperors. The anticipations of Garzoni were to the full realized, for the Cretan, favoring the Turkish conquest, made it possible, and avenged himself in the way of the weak. The Turks, in recompense for the important assistance rendered them by the Cretans, exempted them from conscription or military tax, but learned no lesson from their conquered enemies, and, until the cession of the island to Egypt in 1830, Crete was the scene of the most unbridled license of individuals and fanaticism of sects.
