Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/823

 GREECE

739

GREECE

Patriarchs of Constantinople had succeeded in assert- ing jurisdiction over all this vast territory, as well as over Asia Minor and the purely Slav lands to the North. After the schism of Cocrularius (1054) these metropolitans and bishops followed their patriarch by striking the pope's name from their diptychs. They, too, like their chief, learned to abhor Latin customs, to look on the Latin Church under the pope as a fallen branch and a synagogue of Satan. There is no trace of independent action in any of these local Greek Churches. They all used the Byzantine Rite and fol- lowed the Byzantine Patriarch faithfully. During the short-lived unions of Lyons (1274) and Ferrara-Hor- ence (1439) they became Uniats too. They cared for the union as little as did their leaders at Constanti- nople and fell away again as easily as they had joined. The Latin conquest of their lands (after the Fourth Crusade, in 1204) brought about a rival Latin hier- archy and something very like persecution for the Greeks. Naturally, they hated and scorned the Latin bishops and groaned under the disabilities they suf- fered from the Prankish princes and from Venice. The Slavs invaded their lands, destroyed many of their cities, so that Greek dioceses disappear because there are no more Greeks left in great tracts of what they still affect to call Greece; but the remnants that maintain themselves still look to Constantinople for orders and still keep the Byzantine Rite in Greek. The Turkish conquest brought about still greater hard- ships. Invited in the first instance as allies by the fatal policy of the Emperor John VI (Cantacuzene, 1341-55), the Turks first took hold of European soil by seizing Kallipolis (in the Thracian Chersonese) in 1356. From this time they steadily advanced, taking city after city, ravaging and plundering what they could not keep. In 1361 they took .\drianople and madeit their capital in Europe till the fall of Constantinople. Then, moving north, they conquered the remnants of Stephen Dushan's great Servian Empire (Battle of Kossova, 1389). Lastly, nearly a century after they had first landed in Europe, they finished their work by taking Constantinople (29 May, 1453). From this time till the nineteenth century the Greeks and the Orthodox Church in CSreece were subject to a Moslem government. The Sultans applied the usual terms of Moslem law regarding non-Moslem Theists to the Christian population of their empire (Orth. Eastern Church, 233-244). There was to be no active perse- cution. Christians suffer certain disabilities. They may not serve in the army, and they have to pay a poll-tax; they must dress differently from their mas- ters, may not have as high houses, maj' put no sign of their faith (crosses) outside their churches, nor ring church bells, nor bear arms, nor ride on horses. Their evidence may not be accepted in a court of law against a Moslem. To convert a Moslem to their faith, seduce a Moslem woman, speak openly against Islam, make any treaty or alliance with people outside the Moslem empire is punished with death. As long as they keep these laws they are not to be molested further, and they are quite free with regard to their religion. Of counse any Christian may turn Moslem at any time; if he does so it is death to go back. (During the last century the European Powers have forced the Porte to modify most of these laws.) The Orthodox were organized into a subject community under the name of Roman Nation (rum millet, a strange survival of the name of the old Roman Empire which the Turks had destroyed). Their civil head was the oecumenical pa- triarch. During the century after the Turkish con- quest this patriarch reached the height of his power; then, in 1591, Russia became an independent Church — an example followed later by one branch of the patriarchate after another, till he is now the merest shadow of what his predecessors were. During the centuries between the fall of Constantinople and the beginning of Greek independence the Greek Church

(although it was certainly not happy) has no history, unless one counts as such the affairs of the patriarchate (Cyril Lucarisand the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, for instance, op. cit., 264-268). The other Greek bishops paid their heavy fees to the patriarch and the govern- ment; the parish priests paid their heavy fees to the bishops. The hideous oppression of the Turk over- shadowed all their lives. For the Turk has never kept his own fairly tolerant law. The tribute of children for the Janissary guard was levied till 1638. The Christians were always in a state of simmering rebellion and the Turks were always punishing their attempts by wholesale massacre. In Crete 50,000 Christian children, in the year 1670, were torn from their par- ents, circumcized, and brought up as Moslems; in Asia Minor thousands of Greeks had their tongues torn out for not talking Turkish (op. cit., 237-238). Mean- while the clergy celebrated the Holy Liturgy on Sundays, worked in the fields, and kept wine-shops on week-days. But for the kamclaukion (or kalemau- kirni — the tall hat without a brim) there was little to distinguish them from other peasants. But they kept alive faith in Christ and Hellas, prayed for better days, were generally at the bottom of each attempt at resisting the pasha's abominations, and bore silent but heroic witness for Christ during those dark centuries. And who can reproach them for being poor and ignorant? The schism (not the fault of these poor Papades at any rate) had cut them off from the West. Europe had forgotten them. They had everything in the world to gain by turning Turk; and yet they kept the Christian faith alive among their people, in spite of pashas, and soldiers, and massacres. Their little dark, dirty churches were the centres not only of Christianity but of Hellenism too. And while their wives poured out the strong resinous wine for whispering conspirators, their sons were out on the hills, klephts and armatoloi keeping up the hopeless war for Greece.

The Greek War of Independence brought a great change to the Church of the free kingdom. The clergy had taken a leading part in the revolution. In 1821, at the beginning of the movement, when Alexander Hypsilanti was making his absurd attempt to rouse the Vlachs, Gregory V of Constantinople, forced by the Turkish government, denounced the "Hetairia Phi- like " and excommunicated the rebels. But the Met- ropolitan of Patras, Germanos, the Archimandrite Dikaios (Pappa Phlesas), and other leading ecclesias- tical persons openly took the side of the Greeks, helped them with their counsels, and in many cases even joined in the fighting. Dikaios made a heroic stand with 3000 men against Ibrahim Pasha's Egyp- tians at Maniaki on Mount Malia. In 1822 the Turks began their series of reprisals by barbarously murder- ing the Patriarch Gregory V in his vestments, after the Liturgy of Easter Day (22 April), although he, so far from being responsible, had obeyed them by excom- municating his fellow-countrymen. Throughout the war the Greek Church showed that the cause of her children was her cause too. But, in spite of Greek enthusiasm for Gregory V (his relics were buried with great honour at Athens in 1871), the court of the patriarch (the Phanar) was too much under the power of the sultan for the free Greeks to submit to its juris- diction. The example of Russia showed that a na- tional Church could remain Orthodox and keep the communion of the patriarch while being itself inde- pendent of his authority. As soon as the affairs of free Greece began to be settled, one of the first acts of the national party was to throw off the jurisdiction of the Phanar. .Alexander Koraes wrote at the time: "The clergy of that part of Hellas that is now free cannot submit to the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is under the power of the Turk; it must rule itself by a Synod of freely elected pre- lates" (lloXiTiKo! Xlapaiv^acis, quoted by Kyriakos,