The increasingly detailed reports ofWestern Travelers, from the late seventeenth century onwards, matched by maps and pictures appended to their travelogues, and enhanced from the late nineteenth century through photographic records (such as those preserved in the “phototheques” of the French and German Schools in Athens), can be combined with the Ottoman archives to build up an overall picture of town and village life during the Late Ottoman era and the first few generations of the independent Greek state. In fact the quality of historical geographical information reaches an unsurpassed peak during the early to late nineteenth century, when teams such as the French scientific expeditions to South and Central Greece record not only the characteristics of contemporary settlement, but also document deserted village locations. The latter are extremely valuable for locating settlements mentioned in Ottoman tax records and the Travelers.
Machiel Kiel’s rich presentation (1996) of the detailed archival evidence for Thessaly finds no support for the idea that the lowlands were largely abandoned in later Ottoman times by Greek peasants fleeing oppression; instead he suggests that there is rather a trend for Greek upland inhabitants to migrate to the lowlands, where Muslim villages had low birth rates compared to neighboring Christian villages. The new archival and topographical researches in Messenia by the PRAP Project, coordinated by Jack Davis, are also beginning to document the rural realities behind the rather black and white picture offered by Western Travelers, providing already significant corrections to the scenario they indicate (Bennet et al. 2000, Zarinebaf et al. 2005). Boeotia, after the significant population decline and relocation phase of the seventeenth century, discussed earlier, sees stability in surviving inland villages till the next phase of disruption caused by the early nineteenth-century War of Independence. But in coastal areas piracy appears to have led villages to adopt inland locations or more hidden, defensive plans (Forbes 2000), and certainly Eastern Boeotia becomes noticeably depopulated due to piracy and banditry in Late Ottoman into Early Modern times. However it appears that a more important change occurred in the later nineteenth century, when rural insecurity in the early Greek state caused nucleation of many villages and a final phase of abandonments. Finally, as already noted, the often oppressive yiftlik estates of this era were concentrated in the major plains of Greece, contrasted with more prosperous independent village societies in the uplands (particularly where textile industries were focused), and with commercial communities on the coasts and on key communication routes inland where a new economic boom was visible (Sigalos 2004, Vionis 2005a).
I have elsewhere argued (Bintliff 1995, 2000) that for South-Central Mainland Greece we can now identify at least three major transitions in rural village dynamics. The first is that great decline and recolonization documented for Late Frankish and Early Ottoman times, which leads into a flourishing period of very numerous and populous rural settlements during the sixteenth-century Pax Ottomanica. The second is a more drawn-out process in which village numbers and village size generally decline, over the seventeenth to later nineteenth centuries (with localized recovery in the eighteenth century), the result of military and socio-economic problems (probably also climatic), resulting in a thinner spread of villages. But villages then blossom into substantial size in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. We do know that other regions of Greece and indeed of the wider Ottoman Empire vary considerably in the timing of their cycles of growth, stagnation or decline, and although many do follow this broad pattern, many clearly have out-ofphase cycles to this scheme. Such variability offers essential material for clarifying the historical processes at work in regional trajectories, as I have suggested for regional diversity in the Greco-Roman Aegean (Bintliff 1997). Comparisons and contrasts with parts of the Aegean under Venetian rule, especially those passing from Ottoman toVenetian rule and vice-versa, given the often fine detail given by Venetian archival sources, are already revealing fascinating insights into such processes (Davies and Davis 2007).
Nonetheless the archaeological evidence for lowland Mainland Greece matches the evidence of Western Travelers and sporadic archival sources, to offer a picture of a poor and downtrodden peasantry largely trapped within a tied-tenant or share-cropping system, contrasted to wealthy landowners and merchants exploiting their labor (Lawless 1977).
World History
