Usor:Andrew Dalby/PPC/HC

E Vicipaedia

After Greece achieved its independence, Crete became an object of contention as its Greek populations revolted twice against Ottoman rule (in 1866 and 1897). Religious tension prevailed on the island between the Muslim ruling minority and the Christian majority. Aided by volunteers and reinforcements from Greece and more distant places including Britain, America, France, and Italy, the "Great Cretan Revolution" began in 1866 and the rebels initially managed to gain control of most of the hinterland although as always the four fortified towns of the north coast and the southern town of Hierapetra remained in Ottoman hands. Because the loss of Crete might have been the prelude to a much more serious loss of Ottoman territory in the Balkans, the Ottoman Grand Vizier, A'ali Pasha, arrived in the island in October 1867 and remained there for four months. A'ali Pasha was a man of exceptional intelligence and personal dignity whose qualities impressed even observers who were usually hostile to the Ottomans such as William Stillman, the American writer who was on the island as US Consul. A'ali set in progress a low profile district by district reconquest of the island followed by the erection of blockhouses or local fortresses across the whole of it. These were the basis of continued Turkish military rule until the final crisis of 1896-1898. More importantly, he designed an Organic Law which gave the Cretan Christians equal (in practice, because of their superior numbers, majority) control of local administration. He thus gained the minimum of political cooperation needed to retain control of the island by early 1869 and almost all the rebel leaders had submitted to Ottoman rule though some, notably the pro-Russian Hadjimichaelis, remained in exile in Greece. One symbolic turning point came in the early months of the rebellion when the monastery at Arkadi in 1866 was blown up by its Abbot Manasses, causing the death of most of the rebels and women and children sheltering in it. As reported by Stillman and others over the recently introduced telegraph, this event caused enormous shock in the rest of Europe and in North America and was a famous a major blow to the legitimacy of Turkish rule.

During the Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878, there was a further uprising, which was speedily halted through the intervention of the British and the adaptation of the 1867-8 Organic Law into a constitutional settlement known as the Pact of Halepa. Crete became a semi-independent parliamentary state within the Ottoman Empire under an Ottoman Governor who had to be a Christian. A number of the senior "Christian Pashas" including Photiades Pasha and Adossides Pasha ruled the island in the 1880s, presiding over a parliament in which liberals and conservatives contended for power. Disputes between the two powers however led to a further insurgency in 1889 and the collapse of the Pact of Halepa arrangements. The international powers, disgusted at what seemed to be factional politics, allowed the Ottoman authorities to send troops to the island and restore order but did not anticipate that the reactionary and despotic Sultan Abdulhamid II would use this as a pretext to try and scrap the Halepa Pact Constitution and instead rule the island by martial-law. This action led to international sympathy for the Cretan Christians and to a loss of any remaining acquiescence among them for continued Ottoman rule. When a small insurgency began in September 1895, it quickly spiralled out of control and by the summer of 1896, the Ottoman forces had lost military control of most of the island. By March 1897, the Great Powers decided to restore order by governing the island temporarily through a committee of four admirals who remained in charge until the arrival of Prince George of Greece as first governor-general of an autonomous Crete, effectively detached from the Ottoman Empire, in late December 1898.

A new Cretan insurrection in 1897 led the Ottoman Empire declaring war on Greece. However, the Great Powers (Britain, France, Italy and Russia) decided that Turkey could no longer maintain control and intervened. Turkish forces were expelled in 1898, and an independent Cretan Republic, headed by Prince George of Greece, was founded. Taking advantage of domestic turmoil in Turkey in 1908, the Cretan deputies declared union with Greece. But this act was not internationally recognized until 1913 after the Balkan Wars. Under the Treaty of London, Sultan Mehmed V relinquished his formal rights to the island. In December, the Greek flag was raised at the Firkas fortress in Chania, with Eleftherios Venizelos and King Constantine in attendance, and Crete was unified with mainland Greece. The Muslim minority of Crete initially remained in the island but was later relocated to Turkey under the general population exchange agreed in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne between Turkey and Greece.

One of the most important figures to emerge from the end of Ottoman Crete was the liberal politician Eleftherios Venizelos, probably the most important statesman of modern Greece. Venezilos was an Athens-trained lawyer who was active in liberal circles in Hania, then the Cretan capital. After autonomy, he was first a minister in the government of Prince George and then his most formidable opponent. In 1910 Venizelos transferred his career to Athens, quickly became the dominant figure on the political scene and in 1912, after careful preparations for a military alliance against the Ottoman Empire with Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, allowed Cretan deputies to take their place in the Greek Parliament. This was treated as grounds for war by Turkey but the Balkan allies won a series of sweeping victories in the hostilities that followed