The sultan and his subjects Author:Richard Davey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE GREEKS. The Greek (Roum) population of Turkey, and more especially of Constantinople, may be divided into two distinct sections ; the firs... more »t, descendants of the Byzantines, who either remained in the city or returned to it after the siege of 1453 ; and the second, the progeny of those Greeks who, from time immemorial, have inhabited the coast lines of the Mediterranean, Marmara, the Bosphorus, and of the Black Sea as far as Varna, and those islands of the Archipelago which are still under Turkish rule, of which Crete and Chios are the principal. Very few Greeks comparatively live inland, in Turkey in Europe, except perhaps in Thessaly ; but in every large town of Asia Minor a small and often very ancient Greek colony is invariably to be found. Occasionally the Greek rayas of Turkey are mistaken for Hellenes, but this designation should only be given to the inhabitants of the present Kingdom of Greece. They have also been confounded with theAlbanians, who are not even remotely connected with them, being, in all probability, descendants of the ancient Pelasgi. Such of them as are not Mohammedans belong, not to the Orthodox Church, but to the Uniate, or Roman Catholic branch of the Greek religion. The total Greek population of the Turkish Empire is said not to exceed four and a half millions. At the time of the Turkish Conquest all sense of nationality amongst the Greeks had almost entirely disappeared. The Byzantine Empire, shorn of its possessions, well-nigh ruined, was a mere shadow of its former self. Many rich provinces, too, which, in the earlier Middle Ages, had been thickly populated by Greeks, had, by this time, fallen into the hands of the Genoese and Venetians, who soon forced the more prosperous among them to seek fortune elsewhere. The Cre...« less