Abstract
Other papers in this book are on Greeks and Romans, Greeks and Byron (and I presume the philhellenes too), and our editors might have added Greeks and Slavs. With friends like these, what do Greeks need Turks for? The difference is that the Turks were something more intimate than friends. Eager suitors, they asked not only for the Greeks’ board, but their bed too. So I am dividing my paper into the three stages of intimacy, indeed three of the ages of Man: courtship, marriage, and separation (or its alternative, integration). I am going to emphasise how real and lively that courtship of Greek and Turk was from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries — the heroic years of the first encounter of the people of Rum with the Seljuks and Türkmans, celebrated in Turkish epic poetry; and of how, among the Greeks and Türkmans at least, came the first warning light of any engagement — the realisation of economic disparity between the two parties. But courtship was followed by a series of marriages, albeit shotgun, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, finally consummated by the Ottomans in 1453. This age is best symbolised by an actual marriage that took place one day in May 1346 at Selymbria on the sea of Marmara: that of the beautiful Theodora, daughter of the Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, to the ageing Ottoman Sultan Orhan.
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Notes
* The wording of this chapter differs little from the paper delivered at the University of Warwick on 80 November 1978, which explains why some of the demoticisms in it are more appropriate to a public lecture than a printed article. References have been kept largely to original sources quoted, beyond which the general reader may reasonably expect that such a large subject has attracted a synthesis readily available in English. This is true for the earlier period, where Speros Vryonis, Jr. , The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (University of California, 1971) is a fundamental analysis.
But despite such useful recent surveys as Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge, 1968)
D. A. Zakythinos, The Making of Modern Greece From Byzantium to Independence (Oxford, 1976); and
A. E. Vacalopoulos, Origins of the Greek Nation (New Brunswick, 1970), there is no satisfactory account of the Tourkokratia, particularly from the Ottoman side —
where H. Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London, 1973) is the most recent survey. The Birmingham-Harvard project in late Byzantine and early Ottoman Demography (1978–82) is yielding evidence of how Ottoman conquest, conversion and assimilation worked and of the process of how some Greeks became Turks in two specific areas. But there remains a growing demand for a larger synthesis of the whole subject, towards which this paper can offer only a partial approach.
S. Runciman, ‘Teucri and Turci’ , in Festschrift for Professor A. S. Atiya (Utah, n.d.) 344–8; G. Parthey (ed.) Hierocks Synecdemus et Notitiae Graecae Episcopatuum (Berlin, 1866; reprinted Amsterdam, 1967) pp. 20, 62, 105, 156, 168, 183, 204, 246.
Benjamin of Tudela, Sefer Masa’ot (Itinerary), trans. A. Asher (London, 1907) vol. I, p. 310, vol. II, pp. 172–5; A. Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the Fourth Crusade (London, 1971). Benjamin adds that they were friends with the Jews and that (like all pastoralists who have no fixed ovens or fields) they ‘eat no bread and drink no wine, but devour the meat raw and quite unprepared’. He calls them ‘Kofar Turakh’, ‘kafir’, ‘gavur’ or ‘infidel’ Turks — the same root as ‘Gabras’. I am grateful to Dr Martin Goodman for transliterating the Hebrew.
E. L. Cutts, Christians under the Crescent in Asia (London, n.d.) pp. 46–7: ‘It is said that the proclamation made at midnight from this minaret, and made with the hand before the mouth so as to disguise the words, is not the usual proclamation of the muezzins, but is a proclamation of the Name of the Holy Trinity. … The office of muezzin has been handed down from father to son in the same family; and to this day [1876] the listener can hear the voice from the minaret of Zecharah begin ‘Kadoos Allah, kadoos, &c.’ [i.e. the trisagion] and go off into an unintelligible cry. …’ For other such examples, see F. W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans (London, 1929).
S. Vryonis, Jr., ‘Evidence on human sactifice among the early Ottoman Turks’, Journal of Asian History, V (1971) 140–6; George Pachymeres, De Michaele et Andronico Palaeologis vol. I (ed.) I. Bekker (Bonn, 1835) p. 134.
S. Vryonis, Jr., ‘The Greeks under Turkish rule’ , in N. P. Diamandouros and others (ed.) Hellenism and the First Greek War of Liberation (1820–1830): Continuity and Change (Thessaloniki, 1976) pp. 51–2; and the same’s ‘Nomadization and Islamization in Asia Minor’, Dumbarton Oaks Paters, vol. XXIX (1975) 41–71.
Discussed in A. Bryer, The Empire of Trebizond and the Pontos (London, 1980) Study VII;
see also C. Foss, ‘Late Antique and Byzantine Ankara’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. XXXI (1977) 42.
Nicetas Choniates (Acominatus), Chronicle (ed.) I. Bekker (Bonn, 1835) p. 50; cf. John Kinnamos, Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus, trans. C. M. Brand (New York, 1975) p. 25.
C. Loparev, ‘On the Unionism of the Emperor Manuel Komnenos’, Yizantijskij Vremennik (1917) 344–57; cf. S. Runciman, The Eastern Schism (Oxford, 1955) p. 122.
I. Mélikoff, La Geste de Melik Danismend (Paris, 1960); cf. Bryer, The Empire of Trebizond, Study VI.
S. Vryonis, Jr., Decline (London, 1971) pp. 473–5;
P. D. Whitting, Byzantine Coins (London, 1973) pp. 262, 274;
C. Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey (London, 1968) pp. 264, 391, 398, 402;
D. Talbot Rice (ed.) The Church of Haghia Sophia at Trebizond (Edinburgh, 1968) pp. 46, 55–82; Bryer, The Empire of Trebizond, Study V, 124. The miniature is in Topkapi Saray, Hazinedar Album 2153, f. 48b.
Bryer, The Empire of Trebizond, Study V, 119. The latest significant addition to the growing literature on Dede Korkut is Kh. Koregly, Oguzskiy geroicheskiy epos (Moscow, 1976).
Doukas, Istoria Turco-Byzantina 1341–1462, (ed.) V. Grecu (Bucarest, 1958) p. 59; trans. H. J. Magoulias, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks by Doukas (Detroit, 1975) p. 73.
P. Charanis, ‘Internal strife in Byzantium during the fourteenth century’, Byzantion, vol. XV (1941) 230;
J. Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas (London, 1964) pp. 195–7.
The Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus (ed. and trans.) G. T. Dennis (Washington, D.C., 1977); Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman (ed.) T. Khoury (Paris, 1966);
cf. J. D. G. Waardenburg, ‘The two lights, perceived: Medieval Islam and Christianity’, Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift, vol. XXXI (1978) 276.
A. D. Alderson, The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty (Oxford, 1956);
C. Issawi, An Arab Philosophy of History (London, 1958).
Cf. S. Vryonis, Jr., ‘The Byzantine legacy and Ottoman forms’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. XXIII–XXIV (1969–70) 251–308.
Significantly, one of the earliest concerns of the first Ottoman patriarchs was the relaxation of Canon Law to preserve what could be done of Orthodox marriage and family structure. See, e.g., Ch. G. Patrinels, Ho Theodoros Agallianos tautizomenos pros ton Theophanen medeias kai hoi anekdotoi Logoi tou (Athens 1966) pp. 68–71.
R. Clogg, ‘The “Dhidhaskalia Patriki” (1798): an Orthodox reaction to French revolutionary propaganda,’ Middle East Studies (offprint) 87–115; cf. A. Bryer, ‘The great idea’, in A. Birley (ed.), Universal Rome (Edinburgh, 1967) pp. 100–17.
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© 1983 Tom Winnifrith and Penelope Murray
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Bryer, A. (1983). Greeks and Turks. In: Winnifrith, T., Murray, P. (eds) Greece Old and New. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05123-6_6
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