Introduction

The Ottoman state was one of several Islamic Turkic polities which arose in thirteenth-century Anatolia. Its location in the Northwest as the closest to unconquered Byzantine and Frankish lands encouraged a remarkably successful imperial expansion in that direction through conquest of the Balkans, only subsequently advancing back through Anatolia to incorporate almost all the Middle East during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Lawless 1977).

It remains a commonplace of popular histories of Greece, that after the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 AD, the Aegean succumbed to an unrelieved era of wicked Turkish oppression lasting till 1830 or longer. This view is also surprisingly common even in some academic publications. The stereotypical features of this disastrous four centuries generally include: a population nadir which stays low throughout the period, associated with the flight of the ethnic Greek population to the hills to plan their eighteenth - and nineteenth-century commercial rise and then the Revolution which led to Greek Independence. Then we learn that the Ottomans were a barbarous people with little cultural achievement in Greece, and worse still, they were prone to exercise a negative effect on the gifted Greeks by banning the construction of churches and converting most existing examples to mosques. Finally, we read that no notable changes occurred within the Ottoman period of rule, except due to the initiatives of their subjects.

What should strike us immediately as strange, is that the Ottomans’ own perception of themselves was one of a cultivated society. Any modern visitor to the Old City in Istanbul needs no convincing of the undoubted artistic and architectural achievements of Ottoman civilization. Just a brief visit to the remarkable religious, educational, and welfare complex (kulliye) called the Suleymaniye will do (see Goodwin (1971) for an authoritative overview of the splendors of Ottoman architecture).

We can begin our deconstruction of the above stereotype history by noting that both the traditional Greek, and customary West European, view of the Ottoman Empire stem from the final era of its decline. Then there was indeed widespread arbitrary violence and corruption, and a lack of economic, technological, and political progress compared to the West. However, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Westerners had a very different, and frequently admiring view of the Ottoman world, which was plainly undergoing a great flourishing of population and productivity. The popularity of products of that world, such as its prestigious carpets and tapestries, like those shown on paintings such as Holbein’s

The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The Ambassadors (Jardine 1996), matches the healthy respect shown to Ottoman military prowess abroad.

By its sixteenth-century climax, the Ottoman empire (Color Plate 20.1) covered all the Balkans apart from Slovenia and coastal Croatia, the Middle East excluding Persia, and North Africa from Egypt through to tributary states in Tunisia and Algeria. As a matter of policy the empire was multinational and consciously drew its high officials and much of its elite army officers from non-Muslims (reaya).

In its early phase, to the late sixteenth century, taxes were low and the countryside was dominated by independent villages, with the state intervening to restrict rural lands being dominated by a particular family (Keydar 1983), but over the middle (late sixteenth to early eighteenth century) to late (late eighteenth to early twentieth century) phases internal breakdown and external military and commercial pressures led to rising taxation, insecurity, and the increasing conversion of rural peasants into estate-serfs ofrich landowners. The empire became dependent on West European merchants and bankers, but this also had the positive effect of stimulating the growth of a class of Balkan entrepreneurs, traders, and shipowners, who were fundamental to the creation of national identity in Greece and other Balkan countries, and thus prepared the path for national independence as the empire fell apart piecemeal over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lawless 1977, Inalcik 1972, Inalcik et al. 1997). However there are some Aegean regions where later Ottoman times saw continuing prosperity, such as the Cyclades (Vionis 2005a), and upland communities exploiting new opportunities in textile manufacture or longdistance commerce (Thessaly and other areas in Central-Northern Greece for example).

In the early empire manufacturing was widespread but not generally large-scale or primarily designed for long-distance trade, but significant textile production is already noted in Thessaloniki and the towns of Thessaly. Significant exports from a region of a wide range of products, even to other Ottoman provinces as well as internationally, were subject to special authorization and generally discouraged, in order to ensure local needs and prevent their shortfall through private profiteering. The quality of craft products and access to membership of craft communities was managed by the state through a guild system, which whilst protecting skilled workers, would gradually prevent innovation and entrepreneurial competition, necessary to combat a steady rise in the proportion of goods and their shipping within the empire controlled by Western Europeans. With a weak urban hierarchy, fairs often met the need for rural populations to get goods to cover a year or more (shoes, ceramics, cloth) (Sigalos 2004). The immense needs of the capital Istanbul-Constantinople naturally affected production in a wide radius, so that a large part of the surplus grain from Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace was demanded as tax-in-kind from the state.

Our available resources for Ottoman and Venetian Greece are rich if little-known and only gradually being used for archaeological research programs (Bintliff 1995, Kiel 1997, Zarinebaf et al. 2005, Davies and Davis 2007 (Introduction), Stallsmith 2007). They include: the imperial tax records and local Ottoman and Greek archives (Davis 1991, Kasdagli 2007); travelers’ reports (Tsigakou 1981, Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 1990); maps and naval charts (Sphiroeras et al. 1985, Tolias 1999); then material remains such as public religious and secular buildings, urban and rural domestic-houses, water-management systems, furniture, dress and other textiles, and finally ceramics and additional everyday portable artifacts (Kiel 1990, Vionis 2005a—b, 2009, Bintliff 2007). A model study of texts, buildings, and settlement geography is already available for the island of Lesbos (Karidis and Kiel 2002).

The Venetians kept control of Crete till 1669, and lost their Cycladic dependencies in a gradual progression of Ottoman power between the mid-sixteenth century and the early eighteenth, whilst the Ionian Islands were effectively under Venice from the thirteenth century till 1797. AVenetian archaeology of the Aegean has not fared any better than the Ottoman (Davies and Davis 2007, Introduction), but is likewise now taking off through a major initiative by the PRAP project in the province of Messenia (cf. Davies 2004). As with the Ottoman case, however, there were already well-studied aspects, such as the remarkably detailed Venetian land registers (in contrast to the Ottoman, provided with detailed maps of landholdings) (cf. Dokos and Panagopoulos 1993), personal archives (McKee 2000), and early studies of elite architecture and Venetian fortifications (for example by the Italian scholar Gerola in a series of papers in the 1920s and 1930s). Renewed interest in Venetian fortifications is signaled in Triposkoufi and Tsitouri (2002). Ceramic studies are so rare that their authors make a point of mentioning this (MacKay 1996).

In contrast to early Ottoman policy, Venetian landholding, as befitted a capitalist and commercial state, was very much focused on the accumulation of estates by wealthy individuals, either Italian colonial settlers or local elites, who were utilized by Venice as managers of peasant populations (for detailed study of land use on Venetian Crete see Stallsmith 2007). In the Cyclades, their gradual absorption into the Ottoman empire and low interference or settlement by Turks subsequently, left local Venetian-Greek magnates in control of the bulk of the land into late Ottoman times (Vionis 2005a). Comparison of rural life under successive Venetian and Ottoman control in the same districts is a fascinating insight into historical processes at spatial levels appropriate to regional archaeological survey investigation (Zarinebaf et al. 2005, Malliaris 2007, Stallsmith 2007). A similar comparison between Late Byzantine and Ottoman life can be explored in Bryer and Lowry (1986).

Ottoman-era ceramics (ColorPlate 20.3a-b)

One major tool assisting a deconstruction of past biases is advances in our knowledge of the material culture of the Ottoman era. In the Aegean our ability to recognize Ottoman-era ceramics has leapt forward over the last two decades. Whilst still in the 1980s most field projects did not systematically collect postMedieval finds, and if they did had to be content to classify them as Turkish/Venetian to Modern (or even just Medieval to Modern), we are now in a situation where most pottery sherds found even in the damaged condition of surface finds on regional surveys, whether coarse, domestic or fine ware, can be phased not merely into broad chronological divisions such as Byzantine, Frankish, Ottoman, and Early Modern, but through assemblage reconstruction into subdivisions such as Early, Middle or Late Ottoman (as for example with the recent analyses of deserted village assemblages on the Tanagra Project: Vionis 2004—2005, 2006b). This means that we can approach an Ottoman farm or village with the aim of using its surface ceramic finds to inform us of that community’s relative wealth, economic behavior, and mentalities.