Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1796 diverted the Grand Tour to Greece, where visitors were struck by the juxtaposition of ancient grandeur with the debasement of Ottoman rule. Even more important were the arguments explaining why the Hellenes mattered so much and to whom.
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Soon, treatises on republican patriotism were being directed towards the three million Greeks in Ottoman lands. Vienna’s first Greek-language newspaper (founded in 1790) provided dispatches from the French Revolution. These modern Enlightenment notions – industry, nation, liberty – were already being absorbed by Greek intellectual enclaves in Central Europe.
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By the late 18th century, tens of thousands of Greeks had answered the call, flying Russian flags on their ships and becoming prosperous middlemen between the Black Sea and the Levant.Īs well as transporting grain and furs west, many Greeks started moving new ideas east. First, the northern rim of the Black Sea and its farming steppe were opened up to Russian incursion, forming a new mercantile frontier that Catherine studded with cities with Greek-sounding names – Odessa, Kherson, Mariupol – before recruiting actual Greeks from Crimea and Anatolia to settle there. This Russian victory had two long-gestating consequences for the Greeks. But the process that resulted in Greek independence could be said to have begun half a century earlier, with Catherine the Great’s defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1774. By choosing 1815, Mazower signals that he wants to incorporate the revolution in a wider story about European unification. As Gramsci wrote of Croce, there is a politics of start dates. Mark Mazower opens his history of the Greek Revolution with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
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But the final vision, and the text’s only genuine prediction – that the Greeks would defeat the Ottoman Empire and consolidate their own state through European intervention – was fulfilled. Philologists soon demonstrated that The Oracles of Agathangelos was a forgery written by an itinerant 18th-century priest, Theoklitos Polyeidis. Tantalisingly for Greeks in the 1750s, he also offered a vision of what awaited their descendants: an ‘era of destruction of the Mohammedans’ and the resurrection of an Orthodox empire with the help of the ‘kings of Europe’. He had predicted the reign of Peter the Great and Frederick the Great. Agathangelos had foreseen both the Turkish sack of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism. Known as The Oracles of Agathangelos, it purported to be the collected prophecies of a Byzantine monk who had lived in Sicily four hundred years before.
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Lastly there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that threatens the existence of all - and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests.I n 1751, a pamphlet began circulating in the Greek-speaking lands under Ottoman rule. Then there are two boys who don't live there, but have no other home - and who are more important to its future than anyone might imagine. There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures, and the building's manager, quietly respected for his attention to detail. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear - along with the lawyers, of course. There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a bold and brilliant vision of New York City in the next century.Īs the sea levels rose, every street became a canal.