ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The Greek naval forces of the period of the Greek National Liberation Revolution of 1821-1829 are the historical predecessor of the modern Greek Navy. The navy was one of the main, and for some historians the most important, factors in the success of the Greek rebels. The French admiral and naval historian Jurien de la Gravière wrote: “The Greek sailors did more to liberate their homeland than the phalanxes of clefts and armatols.” As a sailor, in this bloody conflict, I did not hold back the cry of admiration for Greece. The composition and exploits of the fleet, which modern Greece fielded against the Ottoman fleet for 7 years, illuminates the maritime strategy not only of the past, but also of the future. Dimitris Fothiades, the Greek writer and historian of the twentieth century, formulated his assessment quite simply: “Without the fleet, we will not see freedom.”

Background
The capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 also marked the transfer of control of navigation in Greek waters to the Venetians and Genoese. The fragments of Byzantium, which existed for another two or three centuries, practically did not have significant military and commercial fleets. During the Ottoman expansion, culminating in the fall of Constantinople in 1453, almost all the maritime centers of the former empire passed into Ottoman hands. There was an exodus to Venetian-controlled regions and to the West of both Greek intellectuals and merchants and sailors.

The struggle between the Italian republics and the Ottomans for the islands of the Archipelago, Cyprus, Crete, Peloponnese continued for another 3 centuries and was accompanied by the mass emigration of Greek merchants and sailors. One of the first, marine Greek communities arose in Venice, Trieste and Livorno in the early sixteenth century. The heyday of the latter fell on the XVIII-XIX centuries.

To some extent, in the process of assimilation, some sailors and shipowners were lost to both Greek Orthodoxy and Greek shipping. Most of them have maintained their ties to their homeland. On the other hand, in the occupied lands of the Ottomans, the Greeks, who did not want to get along with the Muslims, were looking for places based on transport infrastructure – only the opposite: the further from the roads, the better. Thus began to inhabit the mountainous areas, which had never before, neither in the ancient nor in the Byzantine era, been inhabited. The plain was mainly the place of life of Muslims and later Jews, and the mountains – the place of life of the Greeks, thus, in the words of the modern historian A. E. Vakalopoulos, “the mountains saved and preserved the Greek nation.”
Similarly and for similar reasons, many deserted and unknown in either the ancient or the Byzantine era islands and secluded rocky peninsulas were inhabited.

On the other hand, the development of commerce and navy on some islands was linked to the economic autonomy granted to the Greek population by the Ottomans themselves. Such were Chios and depopulated in the XV-XVI centuries Samos and Kidoniis (Aivalik), which the Ottomans provided as an economic, economic