Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [144]
This spread of Turkish hordes, who rapidly converted into Turkish settlers, within a hundred years had deprived the Greek language community of the heart of its major territory. The population of Greek speakers worldwide was therefore set to fall rapidly, whether by emigration, or simple loss of later generations of learners. Some whole communities of Greek speakers would depart en masse; many individuals would leave their homes to find better opportunities elsewhere; and the children of some Greek families, assimilating to the new environment, would grow up speaking Turkish.
This was a direct blow to the survival of Greek as a major language. Five generations later, it suffered a political blow that shattered its remaining prestige. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, made up of knights from western Europe, turned aside from its appointed mission of attacking the Muslim powers that held Palestine, and captured Constantinople, as well as parts of Greece and the coast of Anatolia. It then proceeded to hold its gains as a ‘Latin Empire’, masterminded by the Venetians, which lingered on pointlessly for a couple of centuries before being absorbed by the Turks. The Fourth Crusade had reduced the East Roman Empire to a set of five separate statelets: although one of these did manage to retake Constantinople in 1261, and reconstitute itself as a rump of empire, no Greek state was ever again more than a minor constraint on the growing power of the Turks. The empire was finally extinguished by the Turks in 1453, and the last Greek statelet, Trebizond, in 1471. It had taken the Turks just over 380 years to advance from Manzikert to Constantinople—the same interval of time that Greece was subsequently to spend under Tourkokratía, as they called the domination of the Turks.
From being the language of a universal empire, so catholic in its aspirations that it scarcely noticed whether its language was Hellenic or Roman, Greek had now become the tongue of a conquered people, the Orthodox Christians, just one of the milletler (’nations’—really, religious groupings) that had a place in the cosmopolitan empire of the Ottoman Turks. Humbled at last, the Greeks now did notice what language they were speaking: it was inseparable from their Orthodox faith, and became an important token of their identity for the long centuries in which they lacked their freedom.
Given that Anatolia had been, in the late first millennium BC, no less Greek-speaking than the Balkan peninsula that culminates in the Peloponnese, the place that we now think of as the farthest natural extent of Greece, it is almost an accident that the Greek-speaking community ended up concentrated in the same place from which it spread two and a half thousand years before. Looking back, we can see that this only reflects the fact that the Muslim powers that threatened from the east, the Arabs and above all the Turks, were better organised, and more coherent in the long term, than the threats that came from the north, the Goths, Avars and Slavs. Slavs could be assimilated; Turks could not.
Consolations in age
ksipnó ke vlépō efθís áno na méni
i í$rTcross;ia Aθiná me parrisían
ky étsi apo psilá mú sindiχéni:
’Tis Elá$rTcross;s tin brín din ev$rTcross;ksían
χrónos tinás poté $rTcross;en din maréni,
yat’ amárandos íne i sofía.’
I awake and see at once above me
The same Athena is waiting candidly, And with these words from on high she talks to me: ’The renown of Greece of old No time will ever efface: For wisdom is imperishable.’
Andreas Myiares (c.1708)
Greek had been undone: it was no more the language of a community with universal aspirations. When the Renaissance took hold in western Europe, it did enjoy a resuscitation as a source of scholarly wisdom. Ability to read the language, and a familiarity with