s, who exercised their
immense patronage in favour of their race, and congregated round the Greek
patriarch in the 'Phanari',[2] the Constantinopolitan slum assigned him
for his residence by Mohammed the Conqueror.

[Footnote 1: 1346-1566.]

[Footnote 2: 'Lighthouse-quarter.']

The alliance of this parvenu 'Phanariot' aristocracy with the conservative
Orthodox Church was not unnatural, for the Church itself had greatly
extended its political power under Ottoman suzerainty. The Ottoman
Government hardly regarded its Christian subjects as integral members of
the state, and was content to leave their civil government in the hands of
their spiritual pastors to an extent the Romaic emperors would never have
tolerated. It allowed the Patriarchate at Constantinople to become its
official intermediary with the Greek race, and it further extended the
Greek patriarch's authority over the other conquered populations of
Orthodox faith--Bulgars, Rumans, and Serbs--which had never been
incorporated in the ecclesiastical or political organization of the Romaic
Empire, but which learnt under Ottoman rule to receive their priests and
bishops from the Greek ecclesiastics of the capital, and even to call
themselves by the Romaic name. In 1691 Mustapha Koeprili recognized and
confirmed the rights of all Christian subjects of the Sultan by a general
organic law.

Mustapha's 'New Ordinance' was dictated by the reverses which Christians
beyond the frontier were inflicting upon the Ottoman arms, for pressure
from without had followed hard upon disintegration within. Achmet's
pyrrhic triumph over Candia in 1669 was followed in 1683 by his brother
Mustapha's disastrous discomfiture before the walls of Vienna, and these
two sieges marked the turn of the Ottoman tide. The ebb was slow, yet the
ascendancy henceforth lay with Turkey's Christian neighbours, and they
began to cut short her frontiers on every side.

The Venetians had never lost hold upon the 'Ionian' chain of islands--
Corfu, Cefalonia, Zante, and Cerigo--which flank the western coast of
Greece, and in 1685 they embarked on an offensive on the mainland, which
won them undisputed possession of Peloponnesos for twenty years.[1] Venice
was far nearer than Turkey to her dissolution, and spent the last spasm of
her energy on this ephemeral conquest. Yet she had maintained the contact
of the Greek race with western Europe during the two centuries of despair,
and the interlude of her rul