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CHAPTER II

THE LATER GREEK CHURCH UNDER THE TURKS

 

(a) Ricaut, State of the Ottoman Empire, 1670, and Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, 1679; Smith, De Græcæ hodiermo Statu, 1680; Covel, Some Account of the Greek Church, 1722.

(b) Neale, Holy Eastern Church; Ranke, The Ottoman Empire, 1843; Findlay, Greece under Ottoman and Venetian Domination, 1856, and The Greek Revolution, 1861; W. A. Phillips, War of Greek Independence, 1897; "Odysseus," Turkey in Europe, 1900; Cambridge Modern History, vol. x. chap, vi., 1907; Kyriakos, Geschichte der Orient. Kirchen, 1902; Silbernage, Verfassung und gegenwärtiger Bestand sämtlicher Kirchen des Orients, 1904.

 

The later history of the Greek Church need not detain us, for although Greece has never enjoyed the happiness of the country whose annals are dull, the page is no longer lit up by the presence of great men or fresh ideas. For more than two centuries the Church was dragged through the depths of degradation. The rapid succession of patriarchs was maintained at Constantinople, precarious, subservient. The provincial bishops—subject to the patriarch, who was subject to the sultan—were entrusted with a measure of local control over their flocks. Another order of Greek officials serving under the Turkish government consisted of the "Phanariots," who derived their name from the quarter of Constantinople which was their centre. These men had the charge of the taxation, the chief concern of the Ottoman government, which was often too weak to protect its subjects from attack and outrage, and wretchedly indifferent to the administration

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