GREECE, HISTORY OF

history of the area from the Byzantine period, beginning about AD 300, to the present. For earlier periods, see Aegean civilizations; ancient Greek civilization; and Hellenistic Age. Geographically, Greece forms the southernmost extension of the Balkan Peninsula. It is a region dominated by mountain systems, and, although not particularly high, these cover some 80 percent of the surface area. The main formations are those of the Dinaric Alps, which push down from the western Balkan region in a southeasterly direction and which, in the Pindus Mountains, dominate western and central Greece. Extensions and spurs of these mountains form the salient features of southern Greece and the Peloponnese. The Balkan range lies north of Greece, extending eastward from the Morava River for about 340 miles (550 kilometres) as far as the Black Sea coast, but the Rhodope Mountains form an arc stretching from this range through Macedonia toward the plain of Thrace. The coastal and riverine plains are in consequence relatively limited in extent; moreover, they are differentiated by marked variations in climate, ranging from the Mediterranean type along the coast to the continental type inland, in the highlands. These plains reveal an accentuated settlement pattern consisting of a series of fragmented geopolitical entities, separated by ridges of highlands, that fan out along river valleys toward the coastal areas. This structure played a significant role in shaping the history of preclassical and classical Greece and continued to do so in the medieval period; for, in spite of the administrative unity and relative effectiveness of the fiscal and military administration of the later Roman and Byzantine states, these still had to function in a geophysical context in which communications were particularly difficult. The southern Balkan Peninsula has no obvious geographic focal point. The main cities in the medieval period were Thessalonki and Constantinople, yet these were peripheral to the peninsula and its fragmented landscape. The degree of Byzantine political control during the Middle Ages is clearly reflected in this. In the Rhodope Mountains, perhaps the most inaccessible of those mentioned, as well as in the Pindus Mountains, state authority, whether Byzantine or Ottoman, always remained a rather distant factor in the lives of the inhabitants. These were regions in which paganism and heresy could survive with little interference or control from a central government or church establishment. This geophysical structure also has affected land use. The highland regions are dominated by forest and woodland and the lower foothills by woodland, scrub, and rough pasture. Only the plains of Thessaly and Macedonia offer the possibility of extensive arable exploitation. The riverine plains and the coastal strips associated with them (such as the region around the Gulf of Argolis and, much more limited in extent, the Gulf of Corinth) present a similar but more restricted potential; they have been used for orchards, viticulture, and oleoculture. Inevitably, the pattern of settlement of larger urban centres as well as of rural communities is largely determined by these features. Finally, the relationship between this landscape of mountains, gulfs, and valleys, on the one hand, and the sea, on the other, is fundamental to the cultural as well as to the political and military history of Greece. The sea surrounds Greece except along its northern bounds; and the extended coastline, including gulfs such as those of Corinth and Thessalonki, which penetrate deep into the interior, has served as a means of communication with surrounding areas to the extent that even interior districts of the Balkans often share in the Mediterranean cultural world. The sea was also a source of danger: seaborne access from the west, from the south, or from the northeast via the Black Sea made Greece and the Peloponnese particularly vulnerable to invasion and dislocation. Additional reading General works All aspects of the country are treated in Glenn E. Curtis (ed.), Greece: A Country Study, 4th ed. (1995). John Campbell and Philip Sherrard, Modern Greece (1968), contains, besides useful historical surveys, valuable chapters on the Orthodox church, literature, and the economy, while paying attention to the values underpinning society. A good source for readings on Greece is Mary Jo Clogg and Richard Clogg (compilers), Greece (1980), a bibliography with more than 800 entries on some 30 subjects, with the majority of cited sources in English. Catherine Delano Smith Greece during the Byzantine period (c. AD 300-c. 1453) Johannes Koder and Friedrich Hild, Hellas und Thessalia (1976), provides a detailed regional historical and geographic survey and includes an extensive bibliography as well as a discussion of the historical and political evolution of the region.General surveys of the history of the Byzantine world all include information dealing with Greece at the appropriate junctures. The most useful are George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, 2nd ed. (1968, reissued 1980; originally published in German, 3rd rev. ed., 1963); and The Cambridge Medieval History, 2nd ed., vol. 4, The Byzantine Empire, ed. by J.M. Hussey, 2 parts (1966-67); the latter in particular contains material relevant to the local historical evolution of the various Greek regions. A wealth of detail on the society and economy of the late Roman world, as well as on the provincial administration of the Greek regions, is provided by A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vol. (1964, reprinted 1986). The transition from late Roman to early Byzantine structures, the fate of urban society, and the effects of the disruptions of the 7th century are surveyed in J.F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1990), with detailed discussion of a number of fundamental developments. Society and economy in the later period are treated in Alan Harvey, Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900-1200 (1989), for the period to the Fourth Crusade; and Angeleki E. Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire (1977), for the period from about 1204 until the end of the empire. Michael F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. 300-1450 (1985), presents a detailed collection of surveys of the physical geography, land use, and settlement patterns of the Balkans (as well as other regions of the empire), together with a discussion of the nature of the Byzantine economy, the fiscal administration, and related topics. Nicolas Oikonomids, Les Listes de prsance byzantines des IXe et Xe sicles (1972), presents the evidence for the development of the middle Byzantine provincial, fiscal, and administrative structures that evolved in Greece during this period. The most accessible materials for demography and population are Peter Charanis, "On the Demography of Medieval Greece: A Problem Solved," Balkan Studies, 20:193-218 (1979); and Peter Charanis (compiler), Studies on the Demography of the Byzantine Empire (1972), a collection of articles.Works dealing specifically with Greece include Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos, Origins of the Greek Nation, trans. from Greek (1970); and Nicolas Cheetham, Mediaeval Greece (1981), both of which provide excellent general accounts, the former in particular presenting both the political, socioeconomic, and ethnic-linguistic issues. English-language surveys of different regions are Donald M. Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros, 1267-1479 (1984); D.A. Zakythinos (Dionysios A. Zakythnos), Le Despotat grec de More, 2 vol., rev. and augmented by Chryssa Maltzou (1975); and Michael Angold, A Byzantine Government in Exile: Government and Society Under the Laskarids of Nicaea, 1204-1261 (1975). Particular aspects of regional history are discussed in David Jacoby, Recherches sur la Mditerrane orientale du XIIe au XVe sicle: peuples, socits, conomies (1979); and Peter Topping, "The Morea, 1311-1364," and "The Morea, 1364-1460," in Kenneth M. Setton (ed.), A History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (1975), pp. 104-166, all of which deal with social and economic as well as political and historical problems connected with the Latin/Frankish presence in Greece. The roles of the Vlachs and Albanians are examined by T.J. Winnifrith, The Vlachs (1987); and Alain Ducellier, L'Albanie entre Byzance et Venise, Xe-XVe siecles (1987). A useful and important survey of Byzantium and the Slavs, as well as the Vlachs and Albanians, is Dimitri Obolenski, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500-1453 (1971, reissued 1982). A basic reference work that deals with all the topics referred to, sometimes in detail, and that also includes further references is Alexander P. Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 2 vol. (1991). John Frederick Haldon Greece under Ottoman rule, 1453-1831 Arnold Toynbee, The Greeks and Their Heritages (1981), is a stimulating survey of the whole range of Greek history from prehistoric times to the present day. One of the few scholarly studies in English of the dark age of Greek history, between the fall of Constantinople and the capture of Crete, is Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos, The Greek Nation, 1453-1669: The Cultural and Economic Background of Modern Greek Society, trans. from Greek (1976). An overview of the critical four centuries of Ottoman rule is contained in D.A. Zakythinos (Dionysios A. Zakythnos), The Making of Modern Greece: From Byzantium to Independence (1976). The crucial role of the church during the period is discussed in Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (1968, reissued 1985). Richard Clogg (ed. and trans.), The Movement for Greek Independence, 1770-1821 (1976), illustrates the emergence of the Greek national movement through contemporary documents; while G.P. Henderson, The Revival of Greek Thought, 1620-1830 (1970), focuses on the intellectual revival that preceded the outbreak of the war of independence in 1821. The war itself is covered in Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821-1833 (1973); and the diplomacy of the period is analyzed in C.W. Crawley, The Question of Greek Independence; A Study of British Policy in the Near East, 1821-1833 (1930, reprinted 1973). The colourful story of the philhellene volunteers who fought alongside the insurgent Greeks is told by William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (1972). The independence movement is also traced in C.M. Woodhouse, Capodistria: The Founder of Greek Independence (1973), a study of the first president of Greece. Greece since 1831 Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (1992), an illustrated survey, focuses mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries. Douglas Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923 (1972), is a detailed study of the gradual expansion of the Greek state. The early years of King Otto's reign are studied in considerable detail in John A. Petropoulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, 1833-1843 (1968). Charles K. Tuckerman, The Greeks of To-day, 3rd ed. rev. and corrected (1886), is a perceptive account of mid-19th century Greece written by the first U.S. minister to Greece. The Goudi coup of 1901, the first of many military interventions in the political process in the 20th century, is the subject of S. Victor Papacosma, The Military in Greek Politics (1977). The meddling of Britain and France in Greece's internal affairs during the First World War is treated by George B. Leon, Greece and the Great Powers, 1914-1917 (1974); while Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922 (1973), thoroughly treats the disastrous Anatolian entanglement. George Th. Mavrogordatos, Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922-1936 (1983), provides an indispensable guide to the complex politics of the interwar period. The impact of the Axis occupation is investigated by Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece (1993). A critical decade of foreign occupation, resistance, and civil war is the subject of C.M. Woodhouse, The Struggle for Greece, 1941-1949 (1976), while his The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels (1985) analyzes one of the consequences of the civil war, the military dictatorship of 1967-74. C.M. Woodhouse, Karamanlis: The Restorer of Greek Democracy (1982), traces the political career of the politician who oversaw the return to democracy. The whirlwind rise to power in 1981 of Andreas Papandreou and his PASOK party is the subject of Michalis Spourdalakis, The Rise of the Greek Socialist Party (1988). Richard Ralph Mowbray Clogg From insurgence to independence Rigas Velestinlis Toward the end of the 18th century Rigas Velestinlis (also known as Rigas Pheraios), a Hellenized Vlach from Thessaly, began not only to dream of, but actively to plan for, an armed revolt against the Turks. Rigas, who had served a number of Phanariote hospodars in the Danubian principalities, spent part of the 1790s in Vienna. There he had come under the influence of the French Revolution, as is manifest in a number of revolutionary tracts he had printed, intending to distribute them in an effort to stimulate a Pan-Balkan uprising against the Ottomans. These tracts included a "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and a "New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Aegean, and the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia." The latter proposed the establishment of what, in essence, would have been a revived Byzantine Empire, but an empire in which monarchical institutions would have been replaced by republican institutions on the French model. Rigas' insistence on the cultural predominance of the Greeks, however, and on the use of the Greek language, meant that his schemes had little potential interest for the other peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. In any case, Rigas' ambitious schemes came to naught. Before he had even set foot on Ottoman soil, he was betrayed by a fellow Greek to the Habsburg authorities, who promptly handed him and a small group of coconspirators over to the Ottoman authorities; he was strangled by them in Belgrade in the summer of 1798. At one level Rigas' conspiracy had thus been a miserable failure, but his almost single-handed crusade served as an inspiration to subsequent generations of Greek nationalists. Western encroachments The arrest of Rigas thoroughly alarmed both the Ottoman authorities and the hierarchy of the Orthodox church, for it almost coincided with the occupation of the Ionian Islands in 1797 by the forces of revolutionary France and with Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. These developments occasioned panic in Constantinople, for they seemed to indicate that the seditious and atheistic doctrines of the French Revolution had arrived at the very borders of the empire. The brief period of French rule in the Ionian Islands, attended as it was by the rhetoric of revolutionary liberation, soon gave way to a short-lived Russo-Turkish condominium, a further period of French rule, and finally, after 1815, the establishment of a British protectorate. Although governed like a colony, the Ionian Islands under British rule in theory constituted an independent state and thus afforded an example of free Greek soil, adjacent to but not under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The economy Theatre at the site of the ancient Greek city of Epidaurus, in the northeastern Peloponnese, 1/4 Despite a rapid rate of growth in the post-World War II period, Greece's economy is one of the least developed in the European Union (EU). Natural resources are limited, industrialization has been achieved only partially, and there are chronic problems with the balance of payments. Shipping, tourism, and, decreasingly, migrant remittances are the mainstays of the economy. By the 1990s receipts from tourism amounted to one-quarter of the trade deficit. Although the Greek economy has been traditionally based on free enterprise, many sectors of the economy have come under direct or, through the banks, indirect government control. This process of expanding state ownership of the economy has, historically, been associated as much with right-wing as with centre to left governments. Trade unions, which are fragmented and highly politicized, wield significant power only in the public sector. Measures were taken in the late 1980s and the early 1990s to diminish the degree of state control of economic activity. Following entry into the European Union, Greece has been a major beneficiary of subsidies for its generally inefficient agricultural sector and for infrastructural projects. Rates of productivity, however, remain low in both the agricultural and industrial sectors, and the development of the country's economy has lagged behind that of its EU partners. Unemployment, hitherto low, has grown as temporary migrants to other European countries have returned to Greece because of those countries' declining demand for immigrant labour. However, some sectors of the economy, notably shipping, have shown considerable dynamism. Resources Greece has few natural resources. Only in the case of nonferrous metals are there substantial deposits. Of these the most important is bauxite, reserves of which amount to more than 650 million metric tons. Fossil fuels, with the exception of lignite of low calorific value, are in short supply. There are no deposits of bituminous coal, and oil production, based on the Prinos field near the island of Thasos, is very limited. The complex dispute between Greece and Turkey that developed in the 1970s over the delineation of the two countries' respective continental shelves-and hence the right to such minerals, in particular oil, as may exist under the Aegean seabed-shows no sign of being resolved. Much of Greece's electrical power needs are supplied by lignite-fueled power stations and by hydroelectric power. Recently, attention has been given to the possibilities of solar and wind power. The land Church of St. Sophia at Mistra, Greece, ruined Byzantine city, on a spur of the Tayetos 1/4 The Greek landscape is conspicuous not only for its beauty but also for its complexity and variety. Three elements dominate. The first is the sea. A glance at the map shows that the Greek mainland is indented. Arms and inlets of the sea penetrate deeply so that only a small, wedge-shaped portion of the interior mainland is more than 50 miles (80 kilometres) from the coast. The rocky headlands and peninsulas extend out to sea as island arcs and archipelagoes; indeed, islands make up roughly 18 percent of the territory of modern Greece. The southernmost part of mainland Greece, the Peloponnese Peninsula, is joined to the mainland only by the narrow isthmus at the head of the Gulf of Corinth (Korinthiaks). The country's second landscape element is its mountainousness. Roughly 80 percent of Greece is mountain terrain, much of it deeply dissected. A series of mountain chains on the Greek mainland, aligned northwest-southeast, enclose narrow parallel valleys and numerous small basins that once held lakes. With the riverine plains (most extensive toward the coast) and thin, discontinuous strips of coastal plain, these interior valleys and basins account for the third dominant feature of the Greek landscape, the lowland. Although not extensive in Greece (accounting for 20 percent of the land area), it has played an important role in the life of the country. Relief Three characteristics of geology and structure underlie these landscape elements. First, northeastern Greece is occupied by a stable block of old (Hercynian) hard rock. Second, younger and weaker rocks (predominantly of limestone origin) make up western and southern Greece. These were heavily folded in the Alp-building phase of the Tertiary Period (66.4 to 1.6 million years ago) when earth movements thrust the softer sediments east-northeast against the unyielding Hercynian block, producing a series of roughly parallel tectonic zones that gave rise to the mountain-and-valley relief sequence noted above. Third, both the Hercynian block and the Hellenidic (Alpine) ranges were subsequently raised and fractured by movements of the earth. These dislocations created the sunken basins of the Ionian and Aegean seas as well as the jagged edges so typical of Greece's landscape. Even today, earthquakes are all-too-frequent reminders that similar earth movements continue, particularly along the major fracture lines. Another consequence of the region's geologic instability is the widespread occurrence of marble (limestone altered by pressure and heat). Seismic disturbances are sometimes associated with volcanic explosions, notably involving the island of Thera (Santorin), which was virtually destroyed by a major eruption in the 2nd millennium BC. The vents of the Kamni Isles in the sea-filled explosion crater of Thera remain active. The island of Melos (Mlos), which rises to 2,464 feet (751 metres), is composed of young volcanic rocks. Thus, relief and geology provide the basis for describing the Greek landscape in terms of six major regions.