Authors: David Brewer
Tags: #History / Ancient
Chandler recorded his impression of the characteristics of the Turks, Greeks and Albanians of Athens and its surroundings. ‘The Turks of Athens’, he wrote, ‘are in general more polite, social, and affable, than is common in that stately race, living on more equal terms with their fellow citizens.’
39
Chandler’s picture of the Greeks is less straightforward. They are, he said, deservedly known as crafty, subtle and acute. On the other hand they are depressed by the memory of Turkish punishments such as the bastinado, and are terrified of the penalties of resistance. Yet they are continually involved in factions, intrigues and private animosities. The Christian Albanians, who were doing the farming and shepherding which the lordly Turk and the lively Greek neglected, were regarded more favourably: ‘Inured early to fatigue and the sun, they are hardy and robust, of manly carriage, very different from that of the obsequious Greek, and of desperate bravery under every disadvantage.’
40
While in Athens Chandler received a letter from the Society of Dilettanti instructing him to return, if it seemed safe and practicable, through the Peloponnese and ultimately via Italy. So on 21 June 1766 Chandler and his party sailed from Piraeus in a felucca from Hydra, manned by seven men and two boys. Also on board were a cook and two servants, a janissary, a Pátras Greek, two Athenian youths, and a plausible adventurer from Corfu, just out of prison, on whom Chandler and his companions had taken pity, which ‘he repaid with dishonesty and deceit.’
41
They left
an Albanian youth, who had travelled with them up to now, in tears on the shore.
They went first to the island of Póros off the north-east coast of the Peloponnese, from where they explored the ruins at Troezen, modern Trizína, on the adjacent mainland. Then they crossed the Corinth isthmus, noting the traces of early attempts to cut it with a canal, and continued along the north side of the Gulf of Corinth to Delphi. Next they went across to the south side at Vóstitsa, modern Éyio, and on to Pátras, from where they explored by boat the Mesolongi lagoons and the Echinádhes islands, site of the battle of Lepanto two centuries earlier, though clearly an event not ancient enough for Chandler even to mention it. They then travelled south to Pírgos and Olympia, and finally returned to Pátras, where on 20 July 1766 they sailed for Zákinthos, having packed a great deal of travel and exploration into the month since leaving Athens.
Along the way Chandler often saw the Greeks at work. Harvesting had already begun, and near Delphi no animals could at first be spared for Chandler’s transport, but next day the villagers obligingly, and no doubt expecting generous payment, appeared with a train of asses and mules and a peasant to guide them. There was virtually no wheeled transport: Chandler saw only one cart on this part of his journey. Threshing was done with horses, running abreast round a stake to tread out the grain. Most other tasks needed human muscle. Chandler saw a man treading milk in a skin to make butter, and at Zákinthos the currants, after being compacted in a large press, were dug out with crowbars and stamped into casks by men with their legs and feet bare.
Fishing was a regular occupation. On an excursion from Athens Chandler found monks trapping eels. Off Mesolongi there was plentiful mullet, said to delight in foul and muddy water, their roes being used for a sort of caviar. Here small sheds on posts dotted the lagoon, ‘designed for watchmen, who observe the finny squadrons, and, by closing the avenues of the fences, secure them in prison’.
42
Near Salamis Chandler himself went out with night fishermen who used a common method. They first formed a trap with a wide circle of netting, then to attract the fish lit a fire of cedar wood dipped in oil, and sprinkled oil on the water to flatten it. ‘At the same time we began to clatter with wooden hammers on the sides and seats of the wherries, to dash with a pole, and to throw stones, disturbing and driving the fish.’
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The nets were drawn in, the fires thrown into the sea, and the boats moved off in darkness to the next fishing ground.
On their travels Chandler and his party were never short of provisions. On the slopes of Mt Hymettus near Athens they had a barbecue
lunch. A friendly Turk supplied a sheep, which was killed, disembowelled and fixed still warm on a spit. The servants ‘cut in pieces the heart, liver, and the like, and mingled them on a skewer, to be dressed on the coals. Some boughs of green mastic served us at once for table-cloth and dish. We fell to with knives or fingers, for the latter are principally used; and a Greek, kneeling by us, circulated wine, pouring it into a shell.’
44
In the countryside near Corinth the fare was simpler. Some goatherds ‘treated us with new cheese, curdled with milk made sour, and with ordinary bread roasted on embers’,
45
but also provided a fat kid from their flock for future consumption.
Where to spend the night was often more problematical. When travelling by boat the party would sleep among the bare rocks on the shore, perhaps sheltered by mastic bushes, or in a cave ‘black with the smoke of fires kindled by travellers, or by mariners and fishermen’.
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Sometimes they slept on board: ‘our carpets and coverlets were spread on the poop of our bark, and the men lay on the deck.’
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When on land they might sleep in a cottage. ‘Our hotel was a cottage without a chimney. We were almost blinded with the smoke. At night the mud floor, on which we lay, was covered with men, women, and children; and under the same roof was the poultry, and livestock belonging to the family.’
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Monasteries were more comfortable. At one near Soúnion they dined on boiled fowls, olives and cheese and then slept out in the open, ‘some under a shed, some in the court, and one of my companions in a tree’.
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At another monastery near Pírgos they were at first cold-shouldered because they were taken for Frenchmen, and therefore abhorred Catholics, but once the misunderstanding was cleared up they were well treated, to supper and an apartment to sleep in. Some again preferred to sleep outside, but were disturbed by the poultry roosting in a nearby mulberry tree and by innumerable goats, and later discovered that a host of large fleas had settled in the folds of their clothes.
Chandler and his party were looked after and helped by virtually everyone they met, whether Greeks, Turks or Albanians. Chandler often had good words for the Albanians, though regularly describing them as savages. One night was spent in an Albanian woman’s cottage: ‘The house was neat though mean, and much recommended afterwards by the honest heartiness of its owner, her husband, and of his family.’
50
Rather different was the group of Muslim Albanians employed by the Turks to guard the roads. They were ‘robust dirty savages’, wrote Chandler, and ‘were represented to us as drunken and quarrelsome, given to detestable vices, and as dangerous as the banditti, against whom they were employed’.
51
But despite their reputation they invited Chandler and his
party to dine with them and, when they nervously declined, pressed on them a portion of their roasted sheep.
In fact Chandler never met any banditti. This may have been thanks to the janissary who accompanied them, and Chandler had high praise for the janissary of their Asia Minor travels. It may also have been because this was a time of relative tranquillity in the Peloponnese: the upheavals caused by the Venetian occupation had ended with their expulsion in 1715, 50 years earlier, and the chaos of the Orlov revolt was still five years in the future.
Chandler’s only real difficulties, apart from the deceitful Corfu adventurer who left Athens with them, were caused by the Italian servant Lombardi whom Chandler hired in Athens. His characteristics, said Chandler, were uncommon address and eloquence, which no doubt led Chandler to take him on, but also profligacy and hypocrisy, which should have led Chandler to sack him. He was a fugitive from justice in Italy, where he was said to have been a priest and robbed the church. He had ingratiated himself with the Turks, and had published what Chandler regarded as a lampoon on Christianity. He had successfully intrigued at Constantinople against leading Greeks. He had repudiated his Greek wife and her children because they would not give up Christianity, and married a young Albanian in a Muslim ceremony, ‘but a plurality of wives ranked among the least criminal of his various enormities.’
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Nevertheless, despite this catalogue of Lombardi’s iniquities and further instances of cheating and duplicity along the way, he stayed with them throughout their month of travel. When they finally sailed for Zákinthos they took leave of Lombardi, ‘whose services we requited with a handsome gratuity in money, besides various presents, some of which he requested’.
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By now the party was suffering from the effects of travel: stomach upsets from too much fruit, fatigue, the daytime sun, and dampness and vermin at night, apart from what was probably malaria from the foulness of the air, which was considered pestilential in those parts. On Zákinthos they had to spend a fortnight of quarantine in the lazaretto, where they were visited by a doctor and well looked after by the prior of the lazaretto and the monks of the nearby Catholic monastery. They had a final lucky escape. They left Zákinthos on 1 September 1766 and sailed safely home in the brig
Diligence
. They had intended to travel in the
Sea Horse
, and changed plans only when it was delayed. The
Sea Horse
, when it eventually sailed, was lost off the Scilly Isles in the following December.
The picture of Richard Chandler that emerges is of a donnish, slightly prim, but essentially kind young man, willing to face the hazards and
uncertainties of his journey but not to take needless risks. He seems always to have been ready to lift his eyes from his study of ruined monuments and to be diverted by what was around him and to relate to the people he met. He was disposed to trust everybody, even the villainous Lombardi – and was probably cheated no more often than those who live in a permanent state of wary suspicion.
While in Zákinthos Chandler retrospectively described the Greece he had visited as a country of misery and desolation, and the Greeks as humble and depressed. He had found poverty certainly, but a productive land rather than a desolate one, and his descriptions of the Greeks were of a people generally cheerful and energetic, not depressed. As with his regular description of Albanians as savages even though he often admired those he met, Chandler seems to have lurched between what he actually saw, and what the fashionable generalities told him he ought to see. A few years later came the Orlov revolt, and the fashionable generalities began to change.
17
1770 – The Orlov Revolt
F
rom 1768 to 1774 Russia and Turkey were at war, in one of a series of conflicts between them that punctuated the eighteenth century. In 1770 a small Russian force, of nine ships and some 600 men led by Count Theodore Orlov, landed at the little harbour of Ítilo in the southern Peloponnese aiming to lead a revolt of the Greeks against their Turkish rulers.
The antagonism between Turkey and Russia went back a long way. A century earlier the Russian foreign minister had proclaimed three main long-term goals for the expanding state. The first was access in the north to the Baltic. This was achieved by Peter the Great at the expense of Sweden, enabling Peter to start building St Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva river in 1703. The second aim was to acquire land, to the west in Byelorussia, then Polish, and to the south in the southern part of the Ukraine, then Turkish. The third objective, involving even sharper conflict with the Turks, was to give Russia access to the Black Sea and ultimately to the Mediterranean.
For Russia the gateway to the Black Sea was the Turkish fortress at Azov in the north-east corner of the Sea of Azov, a huge expanse of water half as large again as Wales, and joined by a narrow channel to the Black Sea. Russian possession of Azov see-sawed: it was taken in 1696 by Peter the Great, lost in 1713, recaptured in 1735, and in 1739 retained by Russia but only on sufferance as an unfortified town. Russia’s door to the Black Sea, and beyond it the Mediterranean, was ajar but still far from being fully opened.
In 1768 war broke out again between Russia and Turkey. Russia had been transformed since the time of Peter the Great. His immediate successors as Tsar or Tsarina had been largely ineffectual, and when his grandson became Tsar Peter III in 1761 the army deposed him within a few months of his accession and installed in his place his wife Catherine, to become known as Catherine the Great. Catherine sent her husband into internal exile in the custody of Alexis Orlov who, it is believed, was responsible for Peter’s assassination soon afterwards, perhaps the first service performed by the Orlov family for the new sovereign.
Catherine moved swiftly to pursue Russia’s long-term aims that had been proposed a century earlier. Access to the Baltic had been gained, but expansion to the west and the south had not. Catherine’s first move was to extend Russian influence westward into Poland. Poland was then the size of today’s France, and its borders stretched 200 to 300 miles into today’s Russian territory, to Smolensk in the north and to Kiev in the south. But Poland’s government had long been chaotic, bedevilled by feuding nobles and hamstrung by the so-called
liberum veto
, by which any member of the parliament could delay business indefinitely. Poland’s other neighbours, Prussia and Austria, were also looking to expand at her expense.
In 1764, two years after her accession, Catherine secured the election to the Polish throne of her former lover Stanislav Poniatovski, with the backing of Russian troops. This was furiously resented by the Polish nobles, a group of whom formed a confederacy that in 1768 appealed to France and to the Ottomans for help against the Russians. France did nothing, but the Sultan, Mustafa III, issued an ultimatum to Russia to withdraw her troops from Poland, and when this was refused declared war.