by denizaksulu » Sun Jun 29, 2008 12:37 am
For Magnus. From European sources including Greek. Makes interesting reading. References at botom of page.
Doros writes that during the first feudal era under the Lusignans, and then under the
Venetians: “It appears that the Barons were only denied the ‘legal’ right to wound arbitrarily
their serf and slaves, or impose the death penalty upon them. But they could and they
did treat them as chattels; they could punish them, sell them or exchange them for animals,
falcons, dogs or horses (this, however, was abolished by Venice in 1493 which decreed
that a slave could only be exchanged for another human salve) and work them to
exhaustion.”120 The famed wealth of the Latin epoch brought little solace to the common
inhabitants of the island. As Braudel puts it: “The wealth of the island under Venetian rule
had been the vineyards, the cotton plantations, & the fields of sugarcane. But whose
wealth? It had belonged to a Venetian & Genoese aristocracy … certainly not to the natives
of the island, Orthodox Greeks.”121 As Kyprianos, the Archimandrite of the Orthodox
Church of Cyprus was to grant several centuries later, under the Venetians the Orthodox
peasants were, “slaves of the chiefs and upper classes.” In his words, they, therefore,
“never ceased to help the Turks, for they hoped under their yoke to find freedom and
rest.”122 Braudel concurs, stating that, “at the time of invasion, the Venetians were abandoned
by the Greeks both in the countryside and the towns.”123 Michel also declares that,
“At the time of the Ottoman invasion, hatred of Venetian rule led many of the Cypriots to
sympathise with, and even perhaps aid the invaders as deliverers, the prospect of Turkish
rule appearing preferable to that of the rival Christian power.”124 Thus, though the Greek
Orthodox Cypriots may not have gained their freedom in the contemporary sense of the
word, with Ottoman rule an end was brought to the practice of serfdom under which a
great proportion of the peasants had hitherto been bound.125 Further, the Orthodox
Church, from its earliest days a central institution in the life of the native populace, was to
be restored to the position of prominence and power that had been wrested from it by the
Latins.126 It was a fact that many years later, notwithstanding the arrival of the age of
nationalism, some Greek Cypriots were still willing to recognise.
Though revisionism was by then rapidly entering the Greek Cypriot appraisal of Cyprus’
Ottoman past, Legislative Councillor Kyriakides was at the beginning of the twentieth
century, to the delight of his Turkish colleagues, to have openly declared:
120. DOROS 1955, 160.
121. BRAUDEL 1995, 156; Doros also emphasises this reality alluded to by Braudel concerning the Latin rule
of the Lusignans that preceded the Venetian era, arguing that too many historians of the Latin period of rule
in Cyprus, “have be[e]n so engrossed in its surface ebullitions and so dazzled by its glitter … that they have
failed to see the realities of the situation.” The “brilliance” of the era that these historians describe, Doros
says, “in such arresting superlatives, is the civilisation of a transplanted ruling class maintained by tribute –
a brilliant, colourful, unstable and sterile civilisation which disappeared, leaving nothing behind it except a
few, albeit imposing, monuments, and a number of words which have found their way into the Greek Cypriot
vocabulary.” DOROS 1955, 155–156.
122. PURCELL 1969, 345.
123. BRAUDEL 1995, 156.
124. MICHEL 1908, 753.
125. According to Jenness, about 85 percent of the population under the Venetians, “were either serfs (parici) or
free peasants (francomati), the latter being half as numerous again as the serfs.” [JENNESS 1962, 44].
Doros, on the other hand, suggests that the majority were, in fact serfs, at least until towards the end of
Venetian rule. DOROS 1955, 226.
126. For a short exposition on the position of the Orthodox Church during this era, see DOROS 1955, 178–185.
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[T]he Greek population has nothing against the Moslems of Cyprus and the Turkish Empire
and that from a historical point of view Cyprus and Greece are grateful to the Turkish
Empire. When Franks and Catholicism threatened to strangle the Greek nation by twisting
round its neck like a snake, Providence has sent the Turks who have saved us. … without
the Turks the Greek nation would have been swallowed by the Franks and Catholicism.127
Four years later he again warmed the hearts of the Turks when during another debate
he stated that:
[B]ut for the appearance of the Turks in the East, Greece and the Greek religion would have
disappeared and had they come to Cyprus but fifty years later, the Honourable member
himself would not have been a Greek and the Greek Church in Cyprus would not have been
in the honoured position which it now held.128
If
Regards
