Changes

b. Even the rights of the patriarch as milet pasha were reduced to nothing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was left the “right” of being held responsible for the Christians. Persecutions and martyrdom were becoming prevalent. All of Europe feared the Ottomans and Russia alone came to their aid, but this only worsened their position and infuriated their occupiers.

a. The situation grew much worse, as national awareness and hope for freedom grew in the captive Christians. The Greeks throughout Turkey paid in blood for the Greek uprising of 1821 and Patriarch Gregory V was martyred that same year.

b. On paper things looked up after the Crimean War where Turks allied with England and France. When signing the Peace of Paris of 1856, the Sultan Medjid issued the Gatti-Gamayun, granting Christians equal rights with Moslems.

c. The Gatti-Gamayun did nothing to improve the lives of the Greeks so they began to retaliate in the second half of the nineteenth century which was back and forth slaughter between the Christians and the Turks.

d. 1861 saw uprisings in Bosnia/Herzegovina, in Serbia, Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bulgaria.

e. 1866 saw rebellion on the island of Crete.

f. 1875 saw a new uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Probably the most mind-boggling changes to occur though in the Church during these 400 years of Moslem occupation was the growth of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Greek nationalism focused itself in the Church, its only real vehicle of power. Even in the face of constant struggle at home in Constantinople and the agony of their faithful the Patriarchs of Constantinople waged a war for power in the Church and won. The patriarchs, throughout these centuries systematically subdued all the Slavic churches which had previously been autocephalic, and the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, where Orthodox Arabs all but making them Greek, and systematically eliminating in them any memory of their independent past.