Venizelos

Michael Llewellyn-Smith, Michael Llewellyn-Smith

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787381421
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386372
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) was the outstanding Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century. Michael Llewellyn-Smith traces his early years, political apprenticeship in Crete, and energetic role in that island’s emancipation from both Ottoman rule and the arbitrary rule of Prince George of Greece.

Summoned to Athens in 1910 by a cabal of officers, Venizelos mastered the Greek political scene, sent the military back to barracks, and led the country through a glorious period of constitutional and political reform, ending in a Balkan alliance waging successful war against Ottoman rule in Europe. By 1914, Greece had doubled in territory and population, and was about to face the challenges of European war. Tensions were rising between the king and the prime minister, foreshadowing political schism.

This book illuminates Venizelos’ political mastery, liberalism and nationalism, and traces his fateful friendship with David Lloyd George. A second volume will complete his story, with the Great War, the post-war peace settlement, Greece’s Asia Minor disaster, and Venizelos’ late years of renewed prime ministerial office, political polarisation and exile in Paris.

PART ONE

THE CRETAN YEARS

It was during the debate on the Foreign Office vote that Stringham made his great remark that ‘the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.’ It was not brilliant, but it came in the middle of a dull speech, and the House was quite pleased with it. Old gentlemen with bad memories said it reminded them of Disraeli.

H. H. Munro (‘Saki’), ‘The Jesting of Arlington Stringham’

1

CRETE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Before the outbreaking of the Greek revolution Crete was the worst governed province of the Turkish Empire …

Robert Pashley, Travels in Crete, London 1837¹

In many places in Crete the number of widows is large: and in one village of Lassithi they actually form the entire populsation…These are striking instances of the depopulating and exterminating character of the late war.

Robert Pashley, Travels in Crete²

It seemed that Venizelos’s father bought the baby boy. The midwife placed the baby outside the house in the road, and his father Kyriakos, passing as if by chance, asked who the child belonged to. ‘It’s a stranger, ’ said the midwife. ‘I’ll buy it: how much?’ said the father. ‘One groat, ’ said the midwife. ‘Right, he’s mine, ’ said the father, and carried the baby into the house.

So the baby Venizelos gave rise to a legend before he was out of nappies. This ritual, apparently common in families that wanted a boy child, was held to provide immunity from the bad luck which had struck down earlier baby boys. Lefteris or Lefteraki, both diminutives of Eleftherios, was the fifth living child of his parents, with three elder sisters and one sick elder brother. Before his birth there had been other baby boys who were either stillborn or died in infancy.

Fairy story or fact? We do not know, but the best historian of the young Venizelos believed that this ritual exchange did take place.³ The boy was born on 11 August 1864 in a two-storey stone house in the village of Mournies, a few miles south of Chania, in the foothills of the White Mountains of Crete. The house, which by 1910 had lost its roof, was reconstructed in the 1960s as a Venizelos museum.⁴

Crete was a part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by the Sultan in distant Constantinople, so Venizelos was born outside the bounds of the Kingdom of Greece, and this shaped his career.⁵ His formative experiences were of Crete under Ottoman government, with its mixed population, gradually developing civil society, nationalist yearnings and periodic uprisings.

When he became famous, Venizelos generated further legends. People said that a strange light had shone in the sky when he was born, or that his father had summoned to the bedside not only an Orthodox priest but also a local Hodja. This story was dismissed by historians, but there is good evidence for the interpenetration of Christian and Muslim practices in Crete, and for intermarriage.⁶ When such stories were later repeated Venizelos would say to his sisters and cousins, ‘Don’t say such things, they will think I was sent from heaven!’⁷

Later in his life, for every Greek who believed Venizelos was sent from heaven, another thought he was in league with the devil.

The Cretan Question

Crete became a part of the Ottoman Empire when the Ottoman Turks displaced the Venetians by force after the great siege of Candia (Iraklion) in 1669. It was the last large Greek territory to fall to Ottoman power. The new regime was welcome to many Cretans who hoped for better things by contrast with the Venetian exploitation of the island. But by the nineteenth century Ottoman rule had deteriorated, as the empire failed to cope with new challenges to the imperial system arising from Enlightenment ideas of the nation and its governance, and from western European technological progress.

The Janissaries were the elite military corps, or Praetorian Guard, of the Ottoman Empire. The Oxford don Robert Pashley, who visited the island in 1834, wrote:

Before the outbreaking of the Greek revolution, Crete was the worst governed province of the Turkish Empire; the local authorities were wholly unable to control the license of the Janissaries who consisted solely of Cretan Mohammedans, and made it a point of honour not to suffer any one of their members to be brought to justice for any ordinary crime.⁸

The stirrings of nationalism in the Greek peoples around the Aegean basin and further afield led in 1821 to an uprising against Ottoman rule, which developed into a long drawn out war of independence. The Cretan Christians took part in the war through armed actions on the island, but could not win their freedom. Support for the Cretans from mainland Greece was spasmodic and insufficient. The Ottoman and Egyptian forces which reinforced Crete’s government confined the uprising to the west of the island and finally extinguished it.

During nearly a decade of war on the mainland the Greek people laid the foundations of independence. Byron died in 1824 at Missolongi while fighting for the freedom of Greece from Ottoman rule.⁹ British, French and Russian warships sunk the Turkish-Egyptian fleet in Navarino Bay in the southern Peloponnese in 1827. In the end, through the tenacious efforts of the Greeks, with the help of philhellenes from abroad, and with the decisive intervention of outside powers, a new state was established in 1832. Its frontier ran in the north from near Arta to the Gulf of Volos. Of the hundreds of islands and islets of the Aegean Sea, the new state included only the Cyclades and the islands of the Saronic Gulf.

The Greek state was poor, small and weak. But its very existence was a momentous outcome. It was the first new European state to be established out of the territories of the multi-religious and multi-ethnic Ottoman and Habsburg empires.¹⁰ Under the treaty of its establishment of 7 May 1832 it enjoyed the protection of three Great Powers, Britain, France and Russia, a status which these Powers later took to include a right of intervention when it pleased them.¹¹ The conditions which were to determine the development of the Greek nation state were present at its birth. They were: the involvement of the Great Powers of Europe; a frontier which incorporated only a minority of those of Greek language, culture and Orthodox religion who were settled within and around the Aegean basin; and a nation overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian but containing other communities—Muslim, Albanian, Jewish, and later Vlach and Slav. Most of these minorities were seen at various times and to different degrees as threatening the identity of the Greek state and nation, and to be assimilated, managed, repressed or pushed out.¹²

The new state came to exert a magnetic force on people of Greek religion and culture from the wider Aegean area. Foremost among these were the Cretan Christians, whose attachment to freedom from foreign rule was always strong and who increasingly sensed that they belonged to a national community with the right to self-government and self-expression as well as religious freedom. It would have saved the Great Powers much trouble if Crete had been included in Greece from the start. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, briefly a candidate for the throne of Greece, wrote to the Duke of Wellington in 1830: ‘The exclusion [of Crete] will cripple the Greek state, morally and physically, will make it weak and poor, expose it to constant dangers from the Turks, and create from the beginning innumerable difficulties for him who is to be at the head of that Government.’¹³ He was right.

Under the pressure of the Powers, the Ottoman Sultan had invited the Albanian ruler of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, to take in hand the troublesome Cretans, and Mehmet had effectively done so. The Powers were not inclined to press the Sultan in the matter of Crete. The Greeks were to be given their own state. Crete might follow in the fullness of time. The Greeks would have to be content with that, and make the best of the Powers’ endorsement of Mehmet’s administration. But the Cretan Christians were not content. The scene was set by these decisions for decades of unrest on the long road towards Cretan self-determination and, finally, union with Greece.

These were the ingredients of the ‘Cretan Question’, which was to perplex British, French, Russian, Italian, Greek and Ottoman politicians, diplomats and intellectuals throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. It was a part of the wider Eastern Question, which preoccupied the Concert of Europe, the ‘international community’ of the day: how to deal with the decline of Ottoman power in such a way as to preserve stability in the Balkans, the Black Sea area, the Near East and the Levant. A key development was the Treaty of Paris of 1856, after the Crimean War, whereby Britain, France, Russia and Prussia undertook jointly to guarantee the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

For Greeks of the young Kingdom, a driving aim of policy was territorial expansion, which came to be summed up by the term Megali Idea, or Great Idea. This was the idea that Greece should incorporate within the new Kingdom the ‘unredeemed’ Greeks living in communities around the Aegean basin and in the islands of the Aegean. Crete was a prime candidate. But that did not mean that Cretans pursuing the idea of union with Greece could rely on support from Athens at all times. The Greek government often had other fish to fry. Athens had to deal with the pressures of the Powers, who in the interests of regional stability frequently called on Greece to show ‘restraint’. It also had to balance the claims of Crete with the demands of other territories—Thessaly to the north of the early Greek frontier, and later Macedonia. Athens sometimes put a higher premium on good relations with Turkey than on support for Cretan irredentism.

The union of Crete with mother Greece, or enosis, was not the inevitable end of nationalist struggle. From time to time there was talk of other solutions, including some form of independence, or autonomy (usually seen as a stage on the road to union with Greece), or even a British protectorate.¹⁴ But the quest for union runs through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century politics as an unbroken thread. As far as it is possible to judge, it was the solution favoured by the majority of the Christians, and by the majority of the islanders once the Christians became a majority. But there was powerful opposition from those, such as leading Muslim landowners, who had a stake in the existing regime. The Cretan Question was devilishly complicated and it was difficult for Greeks and Cretans alike to see how the aim of union with Greece was to be achieved. Cretan captains in the west could hold out in their mountain retreats or conduct bold raiding parties, defying more slow-moving Ottoman troops (often Albanians, brought in by the Ottoman rulers to police the island). But in the end, they faced superior force. The solution to the Question required intelligent tactics and a sure sense of timing as well as force. It could not be achieved by the Cretans or the Greeks on their own. The Great Powers were a necessary part of the solution, possessed of decisive military capacity. But they too were slow moving, they often disagreed with each other, and they did not favour Cretan union with Greece. That is why the Question took the best part of a hundred years to resolve.

There was another reason why disentangling Crete from the Ottoman Empire was not straightforward. On the island, Ottoman occupation had resulted in a mixed population of Christians and Muslims. Most of the Muslims were indigenous Cretans who had converted from Christianity to Islam.¹⁵ ‘The worldly advantages, which used to result from embracing Islamism, have induced whole districts to abandon the faith of their forefathers’, wrote Robert Pashley in 1834.¹⁶ As the years passed, communal relations became a large part of the worries and calculations of the Great Powers. The reports from their consuls on the island left no doubt about the explosive potential of the mixture of populations. The bouts of communal violence which broke out periodically in the second half of the nineteenth century forced the Powers to seek solutions which would limit bloodshed and preserve some sort of stability by holding on to Crete’s existing place in the international order. In doing this they became more closely involved in Cretan affairs, and ended by taking over the administration of the island.

Population, Language, Religion

The effects of the long War of Independence in Crete were devastating. Robert Pashley saw evidence in 1834 of the almost total extermination of the male inhabitants in some parts of the island. Villages were in ruins. In one village in the west he found only one male inhabitant, a young Muslim: ‘The rest are all widows. In many places in Crete the number of widows is large: and in one village of Lassithi they actually form the entire population … These are striking instances of the depopulating and exterminating character of the late war.’¹⁷

The landscape was exotic but dangerous. Slavery was still a part of Muslim society, and some Christians similarly bartered human souls. Pashley’s guide from the mountainous region Sfakia claimed to have captured no less than sixty-four Muslims and sold them through the slave market on the island of Kasos in the Dodecanese.¹⁸ Pashley found that in the principal towns there were slaves in the families of almost every Muslim gentleman: ‘the markets of Khania [Chania] and Megalo-Kastro [Iraklion] are as regularly furnished with human flesh as they are with bullocks, the supply of both being chiefly drawn from the same place, Bengazi.’¹⁹

As noted, the population of Crete was mixed. The largest number were Cretans of Greek Orthodox religion, speaking the Greek language. There were also Greek immigrants from the islands, especially Kythera.²⁰ The majority of the Muslim population of Crete consisted of Greek-speaking ‘Turcocretans’ who had converted from Christianity to Islam after the Ottoman conquest.²¹ This Muslim community had its own characteristics, including a relatively loose adherence to Islam. Visitors from abroad noted that they had continued to drink wine freely. Besides the Greek Orthodox and the Muslims there was a sizeable Jewish community in the big towns, a number of Ethiopians brought over by the Ottomans, and a small community of Europeans or ‘Franks’ engaged in trade. At the apex of political society, besides the consuls of the European Powers and leading representatives of the trading community, was the Ottoman governing elite. For the most part it comprised Muslims, though Christians could rise high in the Ottoman administration, and more than one Ottoman Christian rose to become Governor of Crete in the second half of the nineteenth century.

At the time of the Greek War of Independence the balance between Christia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations: A Note
• List of Illustrations
• Maps
• Introduction
• Part One The Cretan Years
• Part Two Revival and Reform
• Part Three The Balkan Wars
• Notes
• Short Biographies
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover