Greeks (Modern)
Nation | Active
1462 CE to 2057 CE
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes, are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions.
They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world.
Greek colonies and communities have been historically established in most corners of the Mediterranean, but Greeks have always been centered around the Aegean Sea, where the Greek language has been spoken since antiquity.Until the early 20th century, Greeks were uniformly distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Asia Minor, Pontus, Egypt, Cyprus and Constantinople; many of these regions coincided to a large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the Eastern Mediterranean areas of the ancient Greek colonization.
In the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), a large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey transferred and confined ethnic Greeks almost entirely into the borders of the modern Greek state and Cyprus.
Other ethnic Greek populations can be found from southern Italy to the Caucasus and in diaspora communities in a number of other countries.
Today, most Greeks are members of the Greek Orthodox Church.
Related Events
Showing 10 events out of 302 total
The restoration of the city now popularly called Istanbul as a worthy capital of a worldwide empire is one of the tasks to which Mehmed II sets his heart.
To encourage the return of the Greeks and the Genoese of Galata (the trading quarter of the city), who have fled, he returns their houses and provides them with guarantees of safety.
In order to repopulate the city, he deports Muslim and Christian groups in Anatolia and the Balkans and forces them to settle in Constantinople.
He restores the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate on January 6, 1454, and establishes a Jewish grand rabbi and an Armenian patriarch in the city.
In addition, he founds, and encourages his viziers to found, a number of Muslim institutions and commercial installations in the main districts of Constantinople.
The victorious Turks had immediately converted the Hagia Sophia for use as a mosque, adding four minarets at the perimeter of the structure.
The Ottomans convert Saint Savior in the Chora to a mosque, calling it Kariye Djami, and whitewash (and thus protect, perhaps inadvertently) its magnificent mosaics and frescoes.
Construction begins on the Ottoman sultan’s Topkapi Palace.
The victorious Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed II move on from their conquest of Constantinople to conquer Albania and Greece, isolating Venetian outposts here.
The despots of Morea, Demetrios Palaiologos and Thomas Palaiologos, brothers of the last emperor, had failed to send him any aid, as Morea was reeling from a recent Ottoman attack.
Their own incompetence at rule leads to an Albanian-Greek revolt against them, when they invite in Ottoman troops to help them put down the revolt.
At this time, a number of leading Moreote Greeks and Albanians make private peace with Mehmed.
A significant concession concerning slavery, given by Nicholas in a brief issued to King Alfonso in 1454, extends the rights granted to existing territories to all those that might be taken in the future.
The new humanist learning had been regarded with suspicion in Rome as a possible source of schism and heresy from an unhealthy interest in paganism.
Nicholas V, reversing this trend, employs Lorenzo Valla to translate Greek histories, pagan as well as Christian, into Latin.
This industry, coming just before the dawn of printing, contributes enormously to the sudden expansion of the intellectual horizon.
Pope Nicholas V’s chief interest is his library, for which his agents, in pursuit of rare codices, scour Europe.
With assistance from Enoch of Ascoli and Giovanni Tortelli, Nicholas founds a library of nine thousand volumes.
The Pope himself is vastly erudite, and his friend Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, will later say of him that "what he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge" but will add that the luster of his pontificate would be forever dulled by the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a double blow to Christendom and to Greek letters.
"It is a second death," wrote Aeneas Silvius, "to Homer and Plato."
Nicholas V preaches a crusade and endeavors to reconcile the mutual animosities of the Italian states, but without much success.
He will not live long enough to see the effect of the Greek scholars who began to find their way to Italy armed with unimagined manuscripts.
The conquest of Constantinople and its transformation into the Ottoman capital of Istanbul marks an important new stage in Ottoman history.
Internally, it means the end of power and influence for the old Turkish nobility, whose leaders are executed or exiled to Anatolia and whose European properties are confiscated, and the triumph of the devshirme and their supporters in Istanbul and the West.
Externally, the conquest makes Mehmed II the most famous ruler in the Muslim world, even though the lands of the old caliphate remain in the hands of the Mamluks of Egypt and Timur's successors in Iran.
Moreover, the possession of Constantinople stimulates in Mehmed a desire to place under his dominion not merely the Islamic and Turkic worlds but also a recreated Eastern Roman Empire and, perhaps, the entire world of Christendom.
To pursue these objectives, Mehmed develops various bases of power.
Domestically, his primary objective is to restore Istanbul, which he had spared from devastation during the conquest, as the political, economic, and social center of the area that it formerly had dominated.
He works to repopulate the city not only with its former inhabitants but also with elements of all the conquered peoples of the empire, whose residence and intermingling there will provide a model for a powerful and integrated empire.
Special attention is paid to restoring Istanbul's industry and trade, with substantial tax concessions made to attract merchants and artisans.
While thousands of Christians and Muslims are brought to the city, Greeks and Armenians are disinclined to accept Muslim Ottoman rule and seek to secure new European crusades.
Mehmed thus gives special attention to attracting Jews from central and western Europe, where they are being subjected to increasing persecution.
The loyalty of these Jews to the Ottomans is induced by that of their coreligionists in Constantinople, who had supported and assisted the Ottoman conquests after the long-standing persecution to which they had been subjected by the Greek Orthodox church and its followers.
The Ottoman Turks take the Aegean island of Thasos from Genoa in 1455.
Bulgarian resistance had continued, but the capture of Constantinople has given the Ottomans a base from which to crush local uprisings.
In consolidating its Balkan territories, the new Ottoman political order eliminates the entire Bulgarian state apparatus.
The Ottomans also crush the nobility as a landholding class and potential center of resistance.
The new rulers reorganize the Bulgarian church, which has existed as a separate patriarchate since 1235, making it a diocese under complete control of the Greek Patriarchate at Constantinople.
The sultan, in turn, totally controls the patriarchate.
Turahanoğlu Ömer Bey conquers the remnants of the Duchy of Athens in 1456, Constantinople having already fallen to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.
The title "Duke of Athens and Neopatras" despite the Ottoman conquest continues in use by the kings of Aragon and through them by the Kings of Spain, up to the present day.
The Greeks attempt to retain control of their vestigial territories, and the other remaining bastions of Hellenism hold out for a short time longer, but by mid-decade most of peninsular Greece is already in Ottoman hands.
Athens has fallen to the Turks, who in 1458 issue a decree to protect the Acropolis.
The two Greek despots of Morea surrender in 1460 to the Ottomans.
Thomas Palaiologos flees to Italy, his brother Demetrius to the Sultan's court.