Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
In 1453, severely weakened by internal struggles, encroachment of Bulgars from the north and west, and Turks from the south and east, and lacking assistance from Christian Europe and the Pope, Constantinople was lost to the Ottomans. The outcome for the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians and Vlachs(26) of the Balkans was centuries of humiliation under the "Turkish Yoke."
Many Byzantine intellectuals and artists fled west to Rome, Florence, Bologna and especially to the Venetian University of Padua where outside of Papal control Orthodox scholars were welcome. They gave impetus to the Renaissance of Western Europe and later provided teachers that staffed the Ottoman Empire's educational institutions. Out of these came the learned sixteenth through eighteenth century administrators for the Patriarchate(27) of Constantinople, and the Ottoman Porte.(28)
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Orthodox population of the Balkans and those Greek Orthodox living in what is modern day Turkey, the Middle East and Crete, believed their eventual freedom depended on support from the Russian Tsars and the Russian Orthodox Church. This conviction was based in the early eighteenth century victories of Peter the Great, who, victorious over the Ottomans in 1696, captured the fortress at Azov, on the Sea of the same name that empties into the Black Sea.
The terms of Peter's treaty with the Ottomans in 1710 provided for a Russian ambassador to be resident in Constantinople. The ambassador reported that his presence in Constantinople worried the Turks that Tsar Peter was using the position to encourage the Greeks to rise against the Mohammedans. The vision of a Russian armada sailing south across the Black Sea to the walls of Constantinople in support of a Christian rising in the Balkans haunted the Ottoman Porte.
In 1711 Peter decided to enter the Balkans, cross the Danube, conquer the Turks, and seize Adrianople ~ perhaps even Constantinople. He made an appeal to the Orthodox people of Moldavia and Wallachia to rise with him against their oppressor and to join his war against the descendants of the heathen Mohammed.
Tsar Peter failed, surrendering his forces when surrounded by a Turkish-Crimean army on the banks of the Pruth River. With his failure he lost Azov, the better part of an army and almost his life. But his failure ended like a spent forest fire; it left behind buried in its ashes kernels that waited for the right conditions to germinate. These were the seeds of rebellion whose fruit almost two hundred years later would be freedom.
Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbians had strong bonds. They shared a common Slavic identity and had the same religion, overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox. From the time of the fall of Constantinople the Russian Orthodox Church considered itself the stronghold of Eastern Orthodoxy, protector of the faith and of the flock. Tsars and Empresses asserted that they were successors to the Byzantine Emperors. By virtue of this claim the Russian Tsars and Patriarchs posed the possibility of a conflicted outcome for the Greeks of the Balkans. The Greeks welcomed the Russians as liberators and hoped for recreation of a Byzantine Greek Empire, not for incorporation into the Russian Empire.
In the mid-eighteenth century Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, pursued the expansionist policies of her predecessor Tsar Peter. Taking advantage of a border incident with the Turks in 1768 to initiate hostilities, she achieved one military victory after another, on land and at sea. The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kaynarja(29) ended the Ottoman-Russian war of 1768-1774.
Russia gained both access to the Black Sea which for 400 years had been an "Ottoman lake," and unrestricted passage for its merchant ships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The terms of the treaty fostered a new age for the Greeks, for Greek ships which already had held a dominant position in the trade of the Ottoman Empire were permitted to register and sail under the Russian Flag as well. The Empress' encouragement of Greek immigration to the Russian Empire resulted in large Greek communities in Sebastopol and Odessa.
Russia asserted itself as the protector of all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire and secured the right to install consulates throughout Greek speaking lands. Following her great military and political successes against the Turks Catherine the Great conceived of the "Greek Project": an aspiration to reestablish the Greek Byzantine Empire.
Catherine's dream was to see her second grandson, Konstantin, on the throne first held by his namesake Constantine the Great in the fourth century.(30) Catherine's successes continued, and after a second Russian-Turkish war in 1791, Russia annexed the Crimea. However her death in 1796 ended both her life and the "Greek Project."
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