ABSTRACT
At this point Lithgow inserts in his narrative some reÁ ections on the Greeks and their Church under Turkish rule, now that he was, in Macedonia, on Turkish territory. As already noted, he had no great love for the Greeks, and he considered the Greek Orthodox Church to be as corrupt as that of Rome, although he praises the kindness to him of a Greek bishop in the mountainous interior of Crete63 and the monks of Mount Athos for their piety, simplicity of life and hospitality to travellers:
He À nds it necessary to give his readers ‘a caveat concerning vagabonding Greekes, and their counterfeit Testimonials’, and then goes on to correct certain misapprehensions about the position of the Christian communities under Turkish dominion apparently spread by Greek vistors to England in an effort to elicit sympathy for the Christians’ sufferings and À nancial aid for them:
Lithgow exaggerated his case in order to prove his point, for this tolerance by the Turks arose from no positive love of the virtue of toleration of other faiths but rather from a conviction that these unclean inÀ dels, destined for hell-À re anyway, were unworthy of the Muslims’ attention. Lithgow himself denounces the Turks’ contempt for all Christians, and he expressly observed, concerning an incident at the ruins of Troy when his party’s Janissary escort had to be paid off, that one had willy-nilly to yield to their extortions if one valued one’s skin:
But Lithgow was broadly correct in his assertion about the Turks’ disregard for the Christians, provided that the latter gave no trouble. He commented, for instance, that Christians dared not presume to wear clothes of green, the favoured colour of the cAlids, on pain of being bastinadoed or worse (and Fynes Moryson and his brother Henry took care to conceal the green taffeta linings of their doublets).68 Islamic law secured to the ‘People of the Book’, that is, those possessing written scriptures like the Jews and Christians, freedom discreetly to practise their religion, although it regarded them, from the points of view of legal and social status, as morally inferior, second-class persons, on a par with slaves and women. Only sporadically was discriminatory legislation, such as the obligation to wear distinctive clothing (see above pp. 29-30), the prohibition of riding horses, building new churches and synagogues or repairing old ones and building town houses higher than adjacent Muslim ones, put
into practice.69 The Ottoman empire was a vast multiracial and multireligious one. It was probably only in Anatolia as whole, and in certain parts of the Balkan peninsula such as Thrace, Macedonia, Bosnia and perhaps Bulgaria, that the Turks were an actual majority. In the Asiatic lands to the south of Anatolia, mainly Arab in ethnos, the sultans ruled over Christians of the national Armenian Church and various other Eastern churches from the Copts to the Chaldeans; the population of the Balkans, outside the areas of colonization mentioned above, was in majority made up of Greek, Slav, Romanian and Hungarian Christians. The sultans had for long deliberately encouraged the immigration into their empire of foreign artisans, craftsmen and others who could contribute to its prosperity and thus leave the Turks to the businesses of administering and soldiering. It was by means of such a policy that Istanbul, much depopulated at the time of the Turkish conquest in 1453, was made populous and prosperous again. Mehemmed II the Conqueror (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) invited to settle there Greeks and Armenians, and Italian architects and artists worked in the new capital, the best known of the latter being the Sultan’s portraitist, Gentile Bellini.70 Mehemmed further permitted the Jews to settle in Istanbul, and appointed over them a Chief Rabbi or H ĆkhĆm Bashï. The persecutions in Central Europe during the À fteenth century drove considerable numbers of Ashkenazim to Turkey, where they could enjoy a degree of toleration unusual for them in that age, and already from the time of MurĆd II (r. 1421-24, 1446-51) we À nd the sultans following the example of many earlier Islamic rulers in employing Jews as their personal physicians and honouring them accordingly.71 Above all, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the community of the Maranos, and the Jews from the Spanish possessions in Italy shortly afterwards, brought an inÁ ux of Sephardim, who formed a large community in Istanbul, distinctive almost to the present day by their Judaeo-Spanish speech, and came to make Salonica a predominantly Jewish city. Despite Lithgow’s dislike for the Jews, he commends the Salonican community for making much of him during his À ve days’ stay there; these Jews, he
