the pentagram [Muslims]. Holy water helped Christians, Bulgarians were fond of salt; others used the heads of small salted fish mixed in water, while everyone believed in the power of spitting in the face of a pretty child.
Spells required counter-spells. Mendicant dervishes and gypsy women were believed to know secret remedies, especially for afflicted animals. Hodjas provided pest control in the shape of small squares of paper with holy inscriptions that were nailed to the wall of afflicted rooms and Jews wore amulets containing verses from the Torah to ward off the ‘spirits of the air’ which caused depression or fever. Blunt describes some striking cases of cross-faith activity: a Turkish woman snatching hairs from the beard of a Jewish pedlar as a remedy for fever; Muslim children having prayers read over them in church; Christian children similarly blessed by Muslim hodjas, who would blow or spit on them, or twist a piece of cotton thread around their wrist to stop their fever. Doctors were not much esteemed; the reputation of la indulcadera – the healer – stood much higher. Against the fear of infertility, ill health, envy or bad luck, the barriers between faiths quickly crumbled.
Orthodoxy: Tax-Collectors and Martyrs
But we should not paint too rosy a picture of the city’s religious possibilities under Ottoman rule. Life was clearly better for some than for others. Muslims were in the ascendant, and the assertive Sefardic Jews, who dominated numerically, found their rule welcoming and were duly grateful. Mosques and synagogues proliferated as a result of official encouragement, and even the extraordinary episode of Sabbatai Zevi can be seen as illustrating the Ottoman state’s flexibility with regard to the Jews, who lived in Salonica, as a Jesuit priest noted in 1734, with ‘more liberty and privileges than anywhere else’.38
For the city’s Christians, on the other hand, Ottoman rule was very much harder to accept. The Byzantine scholar Ioannis Evgenikos lamented the capture of ‘the most beautiful and God-fearing city of the Romans’, and a sense of loss continued to flow beneath the surface of Orthodox life. After all, not even Saint Dimitrios, its guardian, had saved it from ‘enslavement’. Catholic visitors to the Greek lands often saw their plight as a punishment for their sins. So did many Orthodox believers. An anonymous seventeenth-century author pleaded in tones of desperation with the city’s saint:
O great martyr of the Lord Christ, Dimitrios, where are now the miracles which you once performed daily in your own country? Why do you not help us? Why do you not reappear to us? Why, St Dimitrios, do you fail us and abandon us completely? Can you not see the multitude of hardships, temptations and debts that crowd upon us? Can you not see our shame and disgrace as our enemies trample upon us, the impious jeer at us, the Saracens mock us, and everybody laughs at us?39
The small size of the surviving Orthodox population, its lack of wealth, and the constant erosion of its power left none in any doubt of its plight. The Byzantine scholars who had made its intellectual life so vibrant fled abroad – Theodoras Gazis to Italy, Andronikos Kallistos ending up in London – where they helped hand down classical Greek texts to European humanists. Within the city, while rabbinical scholarship flourished, the flame of Christian learning flickered tenuously through the eighteenth century. Such intellectual and spiritual discussions as were taking place within the empire were going on in the monasteries of Mount Athos itself, in the capital, or in the Danubian Principalities to the north. Salonica – the ‘mother of Orthodoxy’ – became a backwater. Bright local Christian boys usually ended up being schooled elsewhere. It is scarcely a coincidence that one of the best-known works to have been composed by a sixteenth-century scholar from the city, the cleric Damaskinos Stouditis (1500–1580), was a collection of religious texts put into simple language for the use of unlearned priests. Stouditis himself had been educated in Istanbul.40
First among the temptations that afflicted its Christians, of course, was Islam itself. During the prosperous sixteenth century, in particular, many poor young villagers flocked into the city from the mountains, and these newcomers soon formed a very large part of the local Christian population. Some of them, finding themselves adrift and vulnerable to the dangers facing those far from home, converted for the sake of greater security. Other converts were Christian boys apprenticed to Muslim craftsmen, or girls who had entered Muslim households as domestic servants: in both cases the economic power of the employers paved the way to conversion. But this was a dramatic step at the best of times and one which laid the individual open to unrestrained criticism from his relatives and community. Relatively few Christians (or Jews) with families in Salonica appear to have abandoned their faith. To judge from the mid-eighteenth century, which is when the first data became available, the overall numbers of converts were not great – perhaps ten cases a year in the city and its hinterland.41
Even so, Orthodox clerics were always deeply anxious about this. A monk called Nikanor (1491–1549) travelled in the villages to the west of the city, urging the inhabitants to stay true to Christ: ‘by his sweet precepts and the shining example of his virtuous conduct,’ we are told by his hagiographer, ‘he was able to hold many in Christ’s faith’ before retiring to the solitude of an inaccessible cave high above the Aliakmon river. Nikanor also built a monastery nearby, and in his will urged the monks to refrain from begging for alms without permission, not to mix with those of ‘another faith’ and to avoid seeking justice in Turkish courts, stipulations which suggest the extent to which monks and other pious Christians were usually interacting with the Ottoman authorities in one way or another.42
In fact, the very manner in which the Church’s ecclesiastical hierarchy was brought within the Ottoman administrative system added to Christian woes. Patriarchs paid an annual tribute to the Porte and acted as tax-collectors from the Christians. When one sixteenth-century Patriarch toured the Balkans, Suleyman the Magnificent ordered officials to summon the metropolitans, bishops and other clerics to help him collect ‘in full the back payments from the past years and the present year in the amounts which will be established by your examination.’ In the early eighteenth century, the city’s kadi was told to help when it turned out that ‘Ignatius, the metropolitan of Salonica, owes two years’ taxes and resists fulfilling his obligations towards the Patriarchate.’ Fiscal and religious power were separated in both the Muslim and the Jewish communities [where rabbis were salaried employees of their congregations]; for the Orthodox they overlapped, damaging the clergy’s relations with their flock.43
The buying and selling of ecclesiastical favours and offices did not help either: in the seventeenth century alone, there were sixty-one changes of Patriarch. Most Metropolitans of Salonica had run up debts to get into office, and one of the earliest records to survive in the city’s archives is a 1695 Ottoman decree from the Porte on behalf of a Christian money-lender ordering Archbishop Methodios to pay what he owed him. The problem travelled down the hierarchy. One priest demanded to be paid before he would read the sacrament to a dying man; others were accused of taking payment to hear confession. The more their seniors took from them, the more the priests required.44
Money also explained the endless tussles between Salonica’s religious leaders and the lay council of Christian notables, the archons, which supposedly ran the non-religious side of community affairs. When the archons demanded control over management of the city’s charitable Christian foundations, the Patriarchate angrily told them ‘not to involve themselves in priestly affairs’. ‘There is order in everything,’ they were rebuked, ‘and all things in the world, heavenly and mundane, royal and ecclesiastical and civil, right down to the smallest and least important, have their order before God and before men, according to which they are governed and stand in their
