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Cyprus OTTOMAN RULE
Throughout the period of Venetian rule, Ottoman Turks
raided
and attacked at will. In 1489, the first year of Venetian
control,
Turks attacked the Karpas Peninsula, pillaging and taking
captives
to be sold into slavery. In 1539 the Turkish fleet
attacked and
destroyed Limassol. Fearing the ever-expanding Ottoman
Empire, the
Venetians had fortified Famagusta, Nicosia, and Kyrenia,
but most
other cities were easy prey.
In the summer of 1570, the Turks struck again, but this
time
with a full-scale invasion rather than a raid. About
60,000 troops,
including cavalry and artillery, under the command of Lala
Mustafa
Pasha landed unopposed near Limassol on July 2, 1570, and
laid
siege to Nicosia. In an orgy of victory on the day that
the city
fell--September 9, 1570--20,000 Nicosians were put to
death, and
every church, public building, and palace was looted. Word
of the
massacre spread, and a few days later Mustafa took Kyrenia
without
having to fire a shot. Famagusta, however, resisted and
put up a
heroic defense that lasted from September 1570 until
August 1571.
The fall of Famagusta marked the beginning of the
Ottoman
period in Cyprus. Two months later, the naval forces of
the Holy
League, composed mainly of Venetian, Spanish, and papal
ships under
the command of Don John of Austria, defeated the Turkish
fleet at
Lepanto in one of the decisive battles of world history.
The
victory over the Turks, however, came too late to help
Cyprus, and
the island remained under Ottoman rule for the next three
centuries.
The former foreign elite was destroyed--its members
killed,
carried away as captives, or exiled. The Orthodox
Christians, i.e.,
the Greek Cypriots who survived, had new foreign
overlords. Some
early decisions of these new rulers were welcome
innovations. The
feudal system was abolished, and the freed serfs were
enabled to
acquire land and work their own farms. Although the small
landholdings of the peasants were heavily taxed, the
ending of
serfdom changed the lives of the island's ordinary people.
Another
action of far-reaching importance was the granting of land
to
Turkish soldiers and peasants who became the nucleus of
the
island's Turkish community.
Although their homeland had been dominated by
foreigners for
many centuries, it was only after the imposition of
Ottoman rule
that Orthodox Christians began to develop a really strong
sense of
cohesiveness. This change was prompted by the Ottoman
practice of
ruling the empire through millets, or religious
communities.
Rather than suppressing the empire's many religious
communities,
the Turks allowed them a degree of automony as long as
they
complied with the demands of the sultan. The vast size and
the
ethnic variety of the empire made such a policy
imperative. The
system of governing through millets reestablished
the
authority of the Church of Cyprus and made its head the
Greek
Cypriot leader, or ethnarch. It became the responsibility
of the
ethnarch to administer the territories where his flock
lived and to
collect taxes. The religious convictions and functions of
the
ethnarch were of no concern to the empire as long as its
needs were
met.
In 1575 the Turks granted permission for the return of
the
archbishop and the three bishops of the Church of Cyprus
to their
respective sees. They also abolished the feudal system for
they saw
it as an extraneous power structure, unnecessary and
dangerous. The
autocephalous Church of Cyprus could function in its place
for the
political and fiscal administration of the island's
Christian
inhabitants. Its structured hierarchy put even remote
villages
within easy reach of the central authority. Both parties
benefited.
Greek Cypriots gained a measure of autonomy, and the
empire
received revenues without the bother of administration.
Ottoman rule of Cyprus was at times indifferent, at
times
oppressive, depending on the temperaments of the sultans
and local
officials. The island fell into economic decline both
because of
the empire's commercial ineptitude and because the
Atlantic Ocean
had displaced the Mediterranean Sea as the most important
avenue of
commerce. Natural disasters such as earthquakes,
infestations of
locusts, and famines also caused economic hardship and
contributed
to the general condition of decay and decline.
Reaction to Turkish misrule caused uprisings, but Greek
Cypriots were not strong enough to prevail. Occasional
Turkish
Cypriot uprisings, sometimes with their Christian
neighbors,
against confiscatory taxes also failed. During the Greek
War of
Independence in 1821, the Ottoman authorities feared that
Greek
Cypriots would rebel again. Archbishop Kyprianos, a
powerful leader
who worked to improve the education of Greek Cypriot
children, was
accused of plotting against the government. Kyprianos, his
bishops,
and hundreds of priests and important laymen were arrested
and
summarily hanged or decapitated on July 9, 1821. After a
few years,
the archbishops were able to regain authority in religious
matters,
but as secular leaders they were unable to regain any
substantial
power until after World War II.
The military power of the Ottomans declined after the
sixteenth
century, and hereditary rulers often were inept. Authority
gradually shifted to the office of the grand vizier, the
sultan's
chief minister. During the seventeenth century, the grand
viziers
acquired an official residence in the compound that housed
government ministries in Constantinople. The compound was
known to
the Turks as Babiali (High Gate or Sublime Porte). By the
nineteenth century, the grand viziers were so powerful
that the
term Porte became a synonym for the Ottoman government.
Efforts by
the Porte to reform the administration of the empire were
continual
during the nineteenth century; similar efforts by local
authorities
on Cyprus failed, as did those of the Porte. Various
Cypriot
movements arose after the 1830s, aimed at gaining greater
selfgovernment , but, because the imperial treasury took most
of the
island's wealth and because local officials were often
corrupt,
reform efforts failed. Cypriots had little recourse to the
courts
because Christian testimony was rarely accepted.
The Ottoman Turks became the enemy in the eyes of the
Greek
Cypriots, and this enmity served as a focal point for
uniting the
major ethnic group on the island under the banner of Greek
identity. Centuries of neglect by the Turks, the
unrelenting
poverty of most of the people, and the ever-present tax
collectors
fueled Greek nationalism. The Church of Cyprus stood out
as the
most significant Greek institution and the leading
exponent of
Greek nationalism.
During the period of Ottoman domination, Cyprus had
been a
backwater of the empire, but in the nineteenth century it
again
drew the attention of West European powers. By the 1850s,
the
decaying Ottoman Empire was known as "the sick man of
Europe," and
various nations sought to profit at its expense. Cyprus
itself
could not fight for its own freedom, but the centuries of
Frankish
and Turkish domination had not destroyed the ties of
language,
culture, and religion that bound the Greek Cypriots to
other
Greeks. By the middle of the nineteenth century, enosis,
the idea
of uniting all Greek lands with the newly independent
Greek
mainland, was firmly rooted among educated Greek Cypriots.
By the
time the British took over Cyprus in 1878, Greek Cypriot
nationalism had already crystalized.
Data as of January 1991
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