The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire by Alan Palmer Page A

littleresistance from troops in Venetian
pay and found they could count on ready support from the Orthodox clergy. At the same time Ottoman forces captured the last Venetian strongholds in Crete, at Spinalonga and Kalami, and in the
Cyclades they took Tenos—Venetian for the past five hundred years, strongly Roman Catholic, and not yet the centre of Orthodox pilgrimage which was to make the island famous in the nineteenth
century. With the assistance of ships provided by Pope Clement XI and the Knights of Malta, the Venetians tried to mount a counter-offensive in 1717 at a time when the Ottoman commanders were
reeling from a succession of blows struck by Prince Eugene in the Banat. But this final assertion of Holy League solidarity was little more than a gesture. By the summer of 1718, when peace was
made at Passarowitz, Venice had agreed to abandon the Peloponnese. Although the Republic held the Ionian islands, Kithira and four small harbours on the coast of Epirus for almost eighty more
years, they were retained for commercial purposes, not as strategic bases to support a forward policy in the Aegean and the Levant.
    Even though the settlement went almost unnoticed in Western Europe, the Peace of Passarowitz marked the close of an epoch in Mediterranean history. The Ottomans had gained a final strategic
victory, checking the earliest of the maritime challenges from the West. Never again would the lion of St Mark roar across the waters off Lepanto or break the mournful silence of Soudha Bay. Yet as
a sign of sustained Ottoman recovery, these events in the Peloponnese were unconvincing. They were made possible by an identity of interest between Muslims and Orthodox in defeating papal
endeavours to proselytize the eastern Mediterranean. Relations between the thirty Sultans and more than a hundred and fifty Patriarchs who followed the fall of Byzantium were based on a mutual
abhorrence of the Latin religious practice and the hope of mutual respect for the office which each dignitary held. This hope was not always realized; two out of every three Patriarchs were deposed
upon Ottoman insistence after relatively minor deviations in policy; six more grievously offending Patriarchs were hanged, drowned or poisoned. Yet both the Sultanate and the Patriarchate were
naturally conservative institutions, not entirely blind to reform, but instinctively suspicious of beliefs which might disturb the delicate balance ofauthority between them.
Neither consciously promoted nationalism: the Patriarch maintained the Byzantine tradition of universalism within an ecumenical church; the Sultan ruled a multinational empire of which
‘Turks’ were only one component, the socially underprivileged Turcoman Anatolian peasantry. The war to recover the Peloponnese showed that the two institutions could achieve an
operational partnership against the Latin church. It remained to be seen how their relationship would respond to any show of missionary crusading zeal among Orthodox believers beyond the Ecumenical
Patriarch’s spiritual jurisdiction.
    That challenge was closer to hand than either Sultan Ahmed or the Patriarch realized. After rebuffing the Russians on the Pruth in 1711 Ahmed and his Viziers affected a careless contempt for
Tsar Peter, who had vainly attempted to stir up a Balkan Christian revolt. To underestimate what was happening in Russia was a mistake. Within three years of the Peace of Passarowitz, Peter sought
to elevate his status by assuming the title of Emperor of All the Russias; and in the same year, by his ‘Spiritual Regulation’, he subjected the church of Muscovy to a state control
more binding than that imposed by any other European sovereign on a religious hierarchy. Soon new Russian agents, emissaries of Holy Church as well as of an imperial State, began to infiltrate the
Sultan’s Balkan lands where they encouraged a latent patriotic sentiment, especially in the districts which had shown the greatest