User:Biz/Greece-Turkey/background

Byzantine and Göktürk relations: 6th–7th centuries
The Göktürks of the First Turkic Khaganate, which came to prominence in 552 CE, were the first Turkic state to use the name Türk politically. They played a major role with the Byzantine Empire's relationship with the Persian Sasanian Empire. The first contact is believed to be 563 and relates to the incident in 558 where the slaves of the Turks (the Pannonian Avars) ran away during their war with the Hephthalites.

The second contact occurred when Maniah, a Sogdian diplomat, convinced Istämi (known as Silziboulos in Greek writings ) of the Göktürks to send an embassy directly to the Byzantine Empire's capital Constantinople, which arrived in 568 and offered silk as a gift to emperor Justin II. While the Sogdians were only interested in trade, the Turks in the embassy proposed an alliance against the Persians which Justin agreed to. The Persians had previously broken their alliance with the Turks due to the competitive threat they represented. This alliance guaranteed the arrival of west-bound silks from China and increased the risk of a war on two fronts for the Persians, with hostilities that would eventuate with the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 572–591. In 569 an embassy led by Zemarchus occurred which was well received and likely solidified their alliance for war.

Another set of embassies occurred in 575–576 led by Valentine which were received with hostility by Turxanthos due to alleged treachery. They required the members of the Byzantine delegation at the funeral of Istämi to lacerate their faces to humiliate them. The subsequent hostility shown by the new ruler Tardu would be matched in Byzantine writings. With the insults reflecting a breakdown of the alliance, the likely cause is that the anger was due to the Turks not having their expectations met from their agreements and realising they were being used when they no longer aligned with the current goals of the Byzantine Empire (who correspondingly lacked trust in the Turks as partners).

Years later, they would collaborate again when their interest aligned. The Turks attacked the Avars when they sacked a Byzantine city in the Balkans (Anchialos in 584). Toward the end of the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628, the Turks allied with the Byzantine Empire and played a decisive role with the Third Perso-Turkic War.

Byzantine and Seljuk-Ottoman relations: 11th–15th centuries
The Seljuk Turks was a Sunni Muslim dynasty from the Qiniq branch of the Oghuz Turks. They gradually became Persianate and contributed to the Turco-Persian tradition in the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. The Seljuks established both the Seljuk Empire and the Sultanate of Rum, which at their heights stretched from modern day Iran to Anatolia, and were targets of the First Crusade.


 * After the conquest of territories in present-day Iran by the Seljuq Empire, a large number of Oghuz Turks arrived on the Byzantine Empire's borderlands of Armenia in the late 1040s. Eager for plunder and distinction in the path of jihad, they began raiding the Byzantine provinces in Armenia. At the same time, the eastern defenses of the Byzantine Empire had been weakened by Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos ((r. 1042 – 1055)), who allowed the thematic troops (provincial levies) of Iberia and Mesopotamia to relinquish their military obligations in favour of tax payments. As a consequence of this invasion, the Battle of Kapetron occurred in 1048.
 * Over the next century, the Byzantine and Seljuk armies would fight many battles, with the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 considered a turning point in the history of Anatolia. The legacy of this defeat would be the loss of the Byzantine Empire's Anatolian heartland. The battle itself did not directly change the balance of power between the Byzantines and the Seljuks; however the ensuing civil war within the Byzantine Empire did, to the advantage of the Seljuks.
 * Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, worried about the advances of the Seljuks in the aftermath of the Battle of Manzikert of 1071 who had reached as far west as Nicaea, sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza in March 1095 to ask Pope Urban II for aid against the invading Turks. What followed was the First Crusade.
 * The Seljuk sultans bore the brunt of the Crusades and eventually succumbed to the Mongol invasion at the 1243 Battle of Köse Dağ. For the remainder of the 13th century, the Seljuks acted as vassals of the Ilkhanate. Their power disintegrated during the second half of the 13th century. The last of the Seljuk vassal sultans of the Ilkhanate, Mesud II, was murdered in 1308.

The dissolution of the Seljuk state left behind many small Turkish principalities. Among them were the Ottoman dynasty, which originated from the Kayı tribe branch of the Oghuz Turks in 1299, and which eventually conquered the rest and reunited Anatolia to become the Ottoman Empire. Over the next 150 years, the Byzantine–Ottoman wars were a series of decisive conflicts between the Ottoman Turks and Byzantines that led to the final destruction of the Byzantine Empire and the dominance of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1453, the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire. They followed by conquering its splinter states, such as the Despotate of the Morea in 1460, the Empire of Trebizond in 1461, and the Principality of Theodoro in 1475.

Ottoman and Romioi/Rum relations: 1453–1821
All of modern Greece by the time of the capture of the Desporate of the Morea was under Ottoman authority, with the exception of some of the islands.
 * Islands such as Rhodes (1522), Cyprus (1571), and Crete (1669) resisted longer due to other empires that came into power from the Frankokratia days
 * The Ionian Islands were never ruled by the Ottomans, with the exception of Kefalonia (from 1479 to 1481 and from 1485 to 1500), and remained under the rule of the Republic of Venice until their capture by the First French Republic in 1797, then passed to the United Kingdom in 1809 until their unification with Greece in 1864.
 * The mountains of Greece were largely untouched, and were a refuge for Greeks who desired to flee Ottoman rule and engage in guerrilla warfare.
 * In 1770, the Ottoman army invaded the Mani, one of a series of battles by the Ottomans to subdue the Maniots. The Ottoman's would attempt again in 1803, 1807 and 1815.

Life under the Ottoman Empire had several dimensions
 * All conquered Orthodox Christians would be included in the Rum Millet (millet-i Rûm) or the "Roman nation", and enjoyed a certain autonomy. It was named after Roman ("Romioi" in Greek and "Byzantine" by modern historians) subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Christian Orthodox Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Georgians, Arabs, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Serbs were all considered part of the same millet and the religious hierarchy was dominated by Greeks (but there is evidence that they had different names with Rum representing Greeks only).
 * Devshirme was a child levy (in Greek: paidomazoma) which was emotionally traumatic for families. Boys were recruited and forcefully converted to Islam to serve the state but it was also done as a means to dismantle clan ties and dissolve traditions. Historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos estimated 1 million boys were recruited as Janissaries ; a figure closer to 1 in 40 is more likely.
 * Dhimmi were subject to the heavy jizya tax, which was about 20%, versus the Muslim zakat, which was about 3%. Other major taxes were the Defter and İspençe and the more severe haraç, whereby a document was issued which stated that "the holder of this certificate is able to keep his head on the shoulders since he paid the Χαράτσι tax for this year..." All these taxes were waived if the person converted to Islam.

Romioi in various places of the Greek peninsula would at times rise up against Ottoman rule, taking advantage of wars the Ottoman Empire would engage in. Those uprisings were of mixed scale and impact.
 * During the Ottoman–Venetian War (1463–1479), the Maniot Kladas brothers, Krokodelos and Epifani, were leading bands of stratioti on behalf of Venice against the Turks in Southern Peloponnese. They put Vardounia and their lands into Venetian possession, for which Epifani then acted as governor.
 * Before and after the victory of the Holy League in 1571 at the Battle of Lepanto a series of conflicts broke out in the peninsula such as in Epirus, Phocis (recorded in the Chronicle of Galaxeidi) and the Peloponnese, led by the Melissinos brothers and others. They were crushed by the following year. Short-term revolts on the local level occurred throughout the region such as the ones led by metropolitan bishop Dionysius the Philosopher in Thessaly (1600) and Epirus (1611).
 * During the Cretan War (1645–1669), the Maniots would aid Francesco Morosini and the Venetians in the Peloponnese. Greek irregulars also aided the Venetians through the Morean War in their operations on the Ionian Sea and Peloponnese.
 * A major uprising during that period was the Orlov Revolt (Greek: Ορλωφικά) which took place during the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774) and triggered armed unrest in both the Greek mainland and the islands.
 * In 1778, a Greek fleet of seventy vessels assembled by Lambros Katsonis which harassed the Turkish squadrons in the Aegean sea, captured the island of Kastelorizo and engaged the Turkish fleet in naval battles until 1790.
 * In 1803 there was a final fight between the Souliotes and the local Ottoman ruler, Ali Pasha, which ended the many years of conflicts between them.

Greek nationalism started to appear in the 18th century.
 * Following the Orlov Revolt and the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca gave Russian involvement to intervene on the side of Ottoman Eastern Orthodox subjects.
 * Greek ethnic identity had fused with the Rum millet identity. However, the 18th century enlightenment would inspire a new secular "Hellenic" identity of the Rum millet. There was a reconceptualisation of the Rum Millet from being Greek Orthodox religion adherents to all Greek speakers The French Revolution further intensified the growing battle between conservative and liberal Greek Orthodox elites and in the 1790–1800 decade a heated conflict broke out
 * Despite Greek-speaking and non-Greek speaking Orthodox Christians at the time identifying as Romioi, one of the enlightenment intellectuals Adamantios Korais pushed the word Graikoi as a replacement as it helped disassociate it from the Roman heritage and the Church (as well as being an older word than Hellenes).
 * Revolutionary instigator Rigas Velestinlis and the Filiki Eteria behind the 1821 uprising intended to have a Balkan Orthodox uprising and a coalition between all the different ethnic communities. The focus of revolution ideology was the division between the Muslim Ottoman privileged class Askeri with the second class citizens Rayah  which was predominately Greek Orthodox.
 * Ottoman authorities believed Russia's imperial agenda and the general weakness of the state rather than conscientious political action is why the Greek revolution started.

In March 1821, the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire began. In Constantinople, on Easter Sunday, the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, Gregory V, was publicly hanged although he had condemned the revolution and preached obedience to the Sultan in his sermons.

Formation of Greece: 1822–1832
Building on the success of the first year of war, the Greek Constitution of 1822 would be the first of the new state, adopted at the first National Assembly at Epidaurus.

However, the Greek victories would be short-lived as civil war would weaken its ability to react; the Sultan called for aid from his Egyptian vassal Muhammad Ali, who dispatched his son Ibrahim Pasha to Greece with a fleet and 8,000 men, and later added 25,000 troops. Ibrahim's intervention proved decisive: much of the Peloponnese was reconquered in 1825; the gateway town of Messolonghi fell in 1826; and Athens was taken in 1827. The only territory still held by Greek nationalists was in Nafplion, Mani, Hydra, Spetses and Aegina. During this time, there were many massacres during the Greek War of Independence committed by both revolutionaries and the Ottoman Empire's forces.

The Treaty of London (1827) was declined by the Ottoman Empire, which led to the Battle of Navarino in 1827. The French Morea expedition between 1828 and 1833 would expel Egyptian troops from the Peloponnese and the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829) which occurred in retaliation due to Russian support at Navarino, led to the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) which enforced the Treaty of London. Karl Marx in an article in the New York Tribune (21 April 1853), wrote: "Who solved finally the Greek case? It was neither the rebellion of Ali Pasha, neither the battle in Navarino, neither the French Army in Peloponnese, neither the conferences and protocols of London; but it was Diebitsch, who invaded through the Balkans to Evros".

The establishment of a Greek state was recognized in the London Protocol of 1828 but it was not until the London Protocol (1830), which amended the decisions of the 1829 protocol, that Greece was established as an independent, sovereign state. The assassination of Ioannis Kapodistrias, Greece's first governor, would lead to the London Conference of 1832 and that formed the Kingdom of Greece with the Treaty of Constantinople (1832).

The first borders of the Greek state consisted of the Greek mainland south of a line from Arta to Volos plus Euboea and the Cyclades islands in the Aegean Sea. The rest of the Greek-speaking lands, including Crete, Cyprus and the rest of the Aegean islands, Epirus, Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, remained under Ottoman rule. Over one million Greeks also lived in what is now Turkey, mainly in the Aegean region of Asia Minor, especially around Smyrna, in the Pontus region on the Black Sea coast, in the Gallipoli peninsula, in Cappadocia, in Istanbul, in Imbros and in Tenedos.

Kingdom of Greece and Ottoman Empire: 1832–1913
The relations between Greece and the Ottoman Empire during this time period were shaped by two concepts:
 * Termed in history as the Eastern Question with regards to the "sick man of Europe", it encompassed myriad interrelated elements: Ottoman military defeats, Ottoman institutional insolvency, the ongoing Ottoman political and economic modernization programme, the rise of ethno-religious nationalism in its provinces, and Great Power rivalries.
 * In Greek politics, the Megali Idea. It was an irredentist concept that expressed the goal of reviving the Byzantine Empire, by establishing a Greek state, which would include the large Greek populations that were still under Ottoman rule after the end of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1828) and all the regions that had large Greek populations (parts of the Southern Balkans, Asia Minor and Cyprus). The term was first introduced by Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis in 1844 in the inaugural speech of the first Greek constitution in front of Greece's parliament for a common destiny of all Greeks. During the Crimean war the following decade, it became a platform for territorial expansion. It came to dominate foreign relations and played a significant role in domestic politics for much of the first century of Greek independence.

There were five wars that directly and indirectly linked all conflict
 * Crimean War (1854 to 1856). Britain and France prevented Greece from attacking the Ottomans by occupying Piraeus. The unsuccessful Epirus Revolt of 1854 tried to take advantage of this period.
 * Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878): Greece was prevented from taking military action during this war in 1877,  in which the Greeks were keen to join in with the objective of territorial expansion, but Greece was unable to take any effective part in the war. Nevertheless, after the Congress of Berlin, in 1881 Greece was given most of Thessaly and part of Epirus. The 1878 Greek Macedonian rebellion and Epirus Revolt of 1878 occurred during this period.
 * Greco-Turkish War (1897): A new revolt in Crete led to the first direct war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. An unprepared Greek army was unable to dislodge the Ottoman troops from their fortifications along the northern border, and with the resulting Ottoman counter-attack, the war resulted in minor territorial losses for Greece.
 * The two Balkan Wars (1912–1913): Four Balkan states, forming the Balkan League, defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War (1912–1913). In the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria fought against all four original combatants of the first war. (It also faced an attack from Romania from the north.) The Ottoman Empire lost the bulk of its territory in Europe. The First Balkan War had Greece seize Crete, the islands, the rest of Thessaly and Epirus, and coastal Macedonia from the Ottomans. Crete was once again the flashpoint for tension between the two nations. The Treaty of London ended the First Balkan war, but no one was left satisfied. The Treaty of Bucharest, concluded the Second Balkan War, which left Greece with southern Epirus, the southern-half of Macedonia, Crete and the Aegean islands, except for the Dodecanese, which had been occupied by Italy in 1911. These gains nearly doubled Greece's area and population.



The Young Turks, who seized power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908, were Turkish nationalists whose objective was to create a strong, centrally governed state. The Christian minorities of the Empire, including Greeks, saw their position in the Empire deteriorate.