фанариоти

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History
Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance

Author(s): Christine Philliou
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), pp. 151-181
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27563734
Accessed: 06-03-2016 09:51 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR
to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Studies in Society and History.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 130.240.43.43 on Sun, 06 Mar 2016 09:51:04 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Comparative Studies in Society and History 2009,51 ( 1 ): 151 - 181.
0010-4175/09 $15.00 c 2009 Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History
doi: 10.1017/SOO10417509000073
Communities on the Verge: Unraveling

the Phanariot Ascendancy in
Ottoman Governance
CHRISTINE PHILLIOU
Columbia University
I.QUESTIONS OF ASCENDANCY AND DEMISE

Phanariots were an Ottoman Christian elite which, despite structural impedi
ments, imperial ideology, and religious doctrine that would preclude their par
ticipation in Ottoman governance, ascended to power in multiple political
arenas between the 1660s and 1821. Their rise came about just as the larger
imperium was undergoing profound military and political crises precipitated
by both internal threats and periodic invasions by the Russian and Habsburg
Empires. While some Phanariots were stalwart servants of the sultan, others
exacerbated these crises, allying with Russian officials and planning a secessio
nist uprising that would later unfold into the Greek War of Independence. Their
ascendancy, however, is an Ottoman story?a specific outcome of Ottoman
responses to the dilemmas of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.1
There is no single existing framework in which to adequately situate this Pha
nariot ascendancy. This is in part because the vicissitudes of Ottoman governance
at the turn ofthe nineteenth century have been swept away by the two competing
and intertwined historiographies of modernization and nationalism, historiogra
phies that grew out of the very changes that ultimately buried this elite.
Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank CSSH editor David Akin and the four anonymous
CSSH readers of this article for their tremendously helpful comments and suggestions; the staff of
the Ba?bakanhk Ottoman Archives and Ecumenical Patriarchate Archive in Istanbul, the
Gennadeion Library in Athens, and the National Archives of Romania in Bucharest for their assist
ance; as well as Persis Berlekamp, Bob Crews, Nenad Filipovic, Evan Haefeli, Eileen Kane, and
Rebecca Kobrin for reading and commenting on earlier versions. Research for this study was
made possible by the Fulbright-Hays International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the American
Research Institute in Turkey, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of
Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
1 For a fuller elaboration and an extension ofthe present argument beyond the 1820s, see Chris
tine Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Practicing Ottoman Governance in the Age of Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 2009).
151
152 CHRISTINE PHILLIOU
According to the core Ottoman narrative of military and administrative modern

ization, the turn ofthe nineteenth century is a crucial, if underexplored juncture
"between old and new."2 Stanford Shaw characterized the "old" Ottoman Empire
ofthe eighteenth century as a "complicated series of overlapping and intertwined
classes, institutions, and organizations."3 The "new" nineteenth century incarna
tion of Ottoman governance revolved around the Tanzimat reform program, first
promulgated in 1839. Major goals of these reforms were not only the centraliza
tion of political power but also the transformation of Ottoman subjects into an
Ottoman citizenry and the concomitant integration of Muslim, Christian, and
Jewish Ottoman citizens into one supranational political community.
The Tanzimat as an integrationist project was also a response to the "key
dilemma of modern empires," which, according to Dominic Lieven, was one
of "how to square the demands of power, which required a state of continental
scale, with the challenge presented by ethnic nationalism."4 Phanariots were
instrumental in presenting the challenge of ethnic nationalism. In Greek, Roma
nian, Bulgarian, and Serbian national historiographies, Phanariots are depicted
as enlightened oriental despots who operated an "empire within an empire" and
sponsored a Greek cultural revival that led to a "national awakening." In this
context, they spearheaded the process not of integration but separation from
Ottoman governance along ethnic, national lines.5
Phanariots in their Ottoman milieu remain enigmatic for us today because
they ascended to power in an imperial world in crisis, across what would
become national boundaries just at the moment when such boundaries were
beginning to be imagined. Historians have treated Phanariots as a subversive
proto-nationalist faction or a cluster of elite families that were incidental to
Ottoman state and society. This suits the exigencies of both imperial
modernization and national movements. Their Ottoman ascendancy thus
offers us a new vista onto the workings of a multi-confessional empire in the
midst of profound transformations, just before a policy of comprehensive
legal-administrative "modernizing" reforms?and national movements for
2 For instance, there is only one book-length study in English dedicated to the reign of Sei im III:
Stanford Shaw's Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Selim III 1789-1807
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
3 Shaw, Between Old and New, 3.
4 Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), xiii.
Symposium ?Epoque Phanariote 21-25 Octobre 1970 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan
Studies, 1974); K. Th. Demaras, Neoellenikos Diaphotismos [Modern Greek enlightenment]
(Athens: Hermes, 1977; 1993); Nicolae Iorga, Byzance apr?s Byzance (Paris: Balland, 1992);
Zeynep S?zen, Fenerli Beyler: 110 Yilin ?yk?s? [Phanariot princes: A 110-year story] (Istanbul:
Aybay yayinlan, 2000); Paschalis Kitromilides, Neoellenikos Diaphotismos: Hoi politikes kai koi
nonikes idees [Modern Greek enlightenment: Political and social ideas] (Athens: Morphotiko
Hidryma Ethnikes Trapezes, 2000).
COMMUNITIES ON THE VERGE 153
secession?took shape. They were taking part in a positive process, not just
inhabiting a pause "between old and new."
I argue here that many Phanariots were part of a community on the verge of
integration into the larger system of Ottoman governance. Those Phanariots of
the integrationist variety grew into the structures and practices of Ottoman gov
ernance in the second half of the eighteenth century. This Phanariot ascendancy
was a phenomenon with implications beyond the Danubian Principalities they
administered and the Orthodox Christian millet to which they belonged, and for
Ottoman foreign relations and domestic imperial governance. Such a process of
integration stood in contrast to, for instance, Russian Empress Catherine's
policy of toleration, which some scholars argue fostered the integration of par
ticular Muslim institutions and subject groups into the Russian (Orthodox
Christian) imperial project in the late eighteenth century.6 It also stood in
contrast to the subsequent, and much better studied Ottoman Tanzimat
reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Both Catherine's reforms and the
Ottoman Tanzimat constituted deliberate, if only partially successful, integra
tionist projects for Russian and Ottoman governance, respectively.
The process of integration, of which Phanariots were both the products and
agents, was inadvertent in that individuals, groups, and institutions were
growing increasingly dependent on each other without the aid of an explicit
ideology of political integration espoused from the central state.7 Instead, in
response to the exigencies of the time, Phanariots were becoming more and
more indispensable to crucial operations of Ottoman governance, including
foreign relations with European states, food provisioning for the capital city,
provincial governance of strategic regions, and military operations by land
and sea. Such processes demonstrate the extent to which new communities
could develop in multi-confessional empires separately from?and at times
even simultaneously with?ideologies of both integration and separation.
6 Emerging scholarship regarding the Islamic dimensions ofthe Russian Empire, particularly in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, points to the instrumentalization of Islamic institutions,
authority structures, and provincial elites as part of Catherine's policy framework of toleration.
See, for instance, Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central
Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and for the later-nineteenth-century
case of Central Asia, see Adeeb Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in
Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
7 Here I am adding to the discussion of "government in the vernacular" in Ariel Salzmann's Toc
queville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), esp. ch.
3; and of provincial elite integration elaborated by Dina Rizk Khoury in the case of Ottoman Mosul,
in State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540-1834 (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1997). In a broader sense I am responding to the historiography on
Ottoman-local elites that has focused predominantly on the Arab provinces. For example: Albert
Hourani, "Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables," in William R. Polk and Richard
L. Chambers, eds., Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 41-68; and Jane Hathaway, The Politics of House
holds in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise ofthe Qazdagli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
In the following discussion I trace this inadvertent integration in a number of

ways. After briefly defining the offices and tasks of governance involved in the
Phanariot ascendancy, I consider that ascendancy through the lens of the
Ottoman central state in order to show the profound ambivalence and lack of
a consistent state policy toward this rising elite. I then demonstrate through
the symbolism and iconography of the investiture ceremony for Phanariot
princes that even if the sultan and his inner circle were unable to articulate a
formal policy for or against Phanariot integration, they took part in the perform
ance of idealized relationships between particular Phanariots and several
groups involved in Ottoman governance. Third, I turn to the social and ethno
linguistic composition of Phanariot retinues, and go on to consider several
points of contact between members of these retinues and larger Ottoman
patronage networks. Fourth, I offer a series of comparisons that shed light on
the nature of Phanariot integration into Ottoman governance.
The topic of Phanariots in Ottoman governance demands a comparative
approach, since it is a story of elite formation that was a byproduct of
larger processes of imperial governance. The combination of sources I
employ?Ottoman state documents about Phanariots, Ottoman state documents
generated by Phanariots, and a Greek-language source published by a
Phanariot?reflects such a comparative approach. The last of these sources is
Dionysios Photeinos' three-volume History of the Former Dacia, published
in Vienna in 1818 and 1819.8 Not only does it provide exhaustive details of
life and politics from the perspective of a Phanariot functionary, but it was pub
lished at the moment of highest ascendancy for this elite. This was only months
before the outbreak of Greek secessionist rebellions that tore apart the funda
ments of Phanariot networks in Ottoman governance and led to the establish
ment ofthe Greek Kingdom in the early 1830s. For this reason I consider its
audience, its social and political context, and perspectives that emerge from
a close reading of the text. This work in dialogue with a series of Ottoman
state documents constitutes the core case study that I then go on to compare
to cases of other contemporary, Muslim elites within the Ottoman Empire
and in the rival-neighbor multi-confessional Russian Empire.
II.THE OFFICIAL STORY
Phanariots as a group are as difficult to define now as they were in their own
time, lacking as we still do a lexicon for groups that fall between national
and imperial structures. Their ascendancy began in the late seventeenth
8 The book's full title is Historia tes Palai Dakias ta nyn Transylvanias, Wallachias, kai Molda
vias ek diaphoron palaion kai neon syngrapheon syneranistheisa para Dionysiou Photeinou
[History of the former Dacia, the current Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia compiled
from various old and new sources by Dionysios Photeinos] (Vienna: Typ. Io. Varthol. Svekiou,
1818-1819).
COMMUNITIES ON THE VERGE I55
century and lasted until the outbreak ofthe Greek Revolution in 1821. The term
"Phanariot" refers to the quarter in Istanbul?Phanar (T. Fener; Gr. Phanari)?
where the Orthodox Patriarchate was and is located, and the area where Phanar
iots had their residences and therefore base of power, as they dominated the lay
and sometimes clerical offices ofthat institution.9 Situating the neighborhood
that was their power base in Istanbul encapsulates the story of the Phanariot
rise: Phanar was conveniently located near the many docks of the Golden
Horn where crucial provisions arrived in the capital. It was a short boat ride
from Topkapi Palace, the seat of the sultanate, and an even shorter one
across the bay to Kasimpa?a, where the imperial shipyards and arsenal were
located. Phanariots derived their power out of the operations going on at all
of these sites: from their commercial activities and emergence as local elites
in the seventeenth century, their accumulated knowledge of medicine and
European languages useful to the Ottoman imperial project, and their political
relationships to and offices in the Orthodox Church, which had special auth
ority over dispersed Christian populations in the Empire. In the course of the
eighteenth century they branched out into several sectors of Ottoman govern
ance by attaining the four select positions of imperial dragoman, dragoman
of the fleet, voyvoda of Wallachia, and voyvoda of Moldavia. The latter pro
vinces were together known as the Danubian, or Twin Principalities, and bor
dered both the Austrian and Russian Empires, composing much of present-day
Romania.10
9 I use the term "Phanariot" loosely to mean Phanar-based elites and their retinues/affiliates. Pha
nariots differed from non-Phanariot Orthodox Christian elites because they held an office associated
with the Ottoman central state and/or the Phanariot administration in Moldavia and Wallachia, and
were therefore servants ofthe Ottoman state in addition to being merchants or Church functionaries.
The term "Phanariot" has a range of connotations?most often pejorative?that depend on one's
regional and social vantage point. From the perspective of Arab provinces and Romanian/
Bulgarian/Serbian nation-states, "Phanar" connotes the corrupt central Church hierarchy that sup
pressed local non-ethnically "Greek" Orthodox Christian elites, although in actuality Phanariots
mostly operated through lay rather than clerical offices.
10 For general background regarding Phanariots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see
Stephen Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study ofthe Patriarchate of Constantinople
from the Eve ofthe Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1968); Vassilis Sphyroeras, Hoi Dragomanoi tou Stolou: Ho thesmos kai hoi
foreis [The dragomans of the fleet: The institution and its occupants] (Athens: n.p., 1965);
S?zen, Fenerli Beyler; Andre Pippidi, "Phanar, Phanariotes, Phanariotisme," in Hommes et id?es
du Sud-Est europ?en a l'aube de l'?ge moderne (Bucharest: Editure Academei, 1980, and Paris:
Edition du CNRS, 1980); contributions to Symposium L'Epoque Phanariote 21-25 Octobre
1970 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1974); Mihail-Dimitri Sturdza, Dictionnaire His
torique et G?n?alogique des Grandes Familles de Gr?ce d'Albanie et de Constantinople (Paris:
Chez l'auteur, 1983, 1999); Damien Janos, "Panaiotis Nicousios and Alexander Mavrocordatos:
The Rise of the Phanariots and the Office of Grand Dragoman in the Ottoman Administration in
the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century," Archivum Ottomanicum 23 (2005): 177-96; and
Mihai Tipau, Domnii Fanariotii in Tarde Romani (1711-1821): Mica Enciclopedie [Phanariot
Princes in Romanian Lands (1711-1821)] (Bucharest: Editura Omonia, 2008).
I56 CHRISTINE PHILLIOU
These four supreme positions of dragoman and voyvoda served as the prongs
of Phanariot networks as they spread into multiple areas of Ottoman govern
ance. The two voyvodas of Moldavia and Wallachia managed tax collection,
provincial administration (including church administration of the many lucra
tive monasteries), policing the imperial boundaries with Russia and Austria,
and foreign relations conducted at the border.11 From the mid-eighteenth
century the voyvodas of these two provinces also had special agreements
with the sultan to provide ever more grain and meat for the imperial capital
and, in times of war, for the Ottoman military.12
The dragoman ofthe court was the liaison between European envoys and the
sultan and his inner circle, as well as between the Orthodox Patriarch (and his
lucrative empire-wide ecclesiastical administration) and the Court.13 The dra
goman of the fleet, the final office to be created and granted to Phanariots
was second in command to the kapudan pasha (Ottoman admiral) and was
de facto the administrator of many Aegean islands and Anatolian coastal
localities. He was also responsible for naval operations that included shipbuild
ing and warfare. Finally, there were several other dragoman positions that were
of strategic importance but were not as formalized as that of the divan and the
fleet. These included the dragoman of the imperial army (terciiman-i ordu-yu
Hiimayun)14 and dragoman ofthe Morea (mora terc?mani)}5 Both positions
further integrated Phanariot networks into the larger arena of Ottoman
governance.
Let us turn to the social composition of the Phanariot retinues. Within our
own terminology we might refer to Phanariots as transnational, but this was
an age before nation-states. At the top echelons of the Phanariot network, as
in the official bureaucracy of the Orthodox Church, Greek was the dominant
1 ' Voyvodas were also known as prince, SI. voevode, hospodar; T. bey, voyvoda; Gr. hegemonas,
prigkepas. Moldavia and Wallachia were Bogdan and Eflak, and were often referred to together in
Ottoman Turkish as Memleketeyn, or the Twin Principalities.
12 This became ever more important in the eighteenth century, after 1765 interruptions in supply
from Egypt and the 1783 loss of Crimea to Russia. M. M. Alexandrescu-Dersca-Bulgaru, "Les rap
ports ?conomiques de l'Empire Ottoman avec les Principaut?s Roumaines et leur r?glementation
par les Khatt-i Serif de privileges (1774-1829)," in Jean-Louis Bacque-Grammont and Paul
Dumont, eds., Economie et soci?t?s dans l'Empire Ottoman (fin du XVIIIe-d?but du XIXe si?cle)
(Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1983), 317-26.
1 The grand dragoman was "the only Ottoman official to pay formal calls on European diplo
mats" by the turn ofthe nineteenth century. See Carter Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman
Empire: The Sublime Porte 1789-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 78. In the
period under discussion, the Principalities were supplying one-third of the grain for Istanbul.
Tevfik Guran, "The State Role in the Grain Supply of Istanbul, the Grain Administration, 1793
1839," International Journal of Turkish Studies 3, 1 (1984-1985): 27-41.
14 Musurus Papers (hereafter "MP") II.2.18; BOA HAT 11633.
15 Dimitris Stamatopoulos, "Constantinople in the P?loponn?se: The Case ofthe Dragoman of
the Morea Georgios Wallerianos and some Aspects ofthe Revolutionary Process," in Ottoman Rule
and the Balkans, 1760-1850: Conflict, Transformation, Adaptation (Rethymno, Greece: Univer
sity of Crete Press, 2007), 148-67.
language, and yet it would be inaccurate at best to call them Greek ''nationals."
Christians of several linguistic groups were brought into the Phanariot fold,
including those raised as speakers of Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian, and
Armenian.16 In order to be translators, proficiency was required in European
languages (usually Italian and French) in addition to the elsine-i selase, or
the Three Languages?Arabic, Persian, and Turkish?that constituted
Ottoman Turkish.17 Phanariots operated out of Istanbul, and across what we
now call the Balkans, as well as the Aegean islands, much of Anatolia, and
even between the trade entrep?ts and churches and monasteries of Egypt, Pales
tine, and Syria. The "Twin" Danubian Principalities were their major provincial
power base. There, as tax farmer-governors, they co-opted, and married into the
local Romanian-speaking class of boyar landowners and supplied the Ottoman
military and its capital of Istanbul with crucial food provisions. Given these
interlinked patronage networks, there were few degrees of separation
between monks on Mt. Sinai, merchants in Anatolia, diplomats in Istanbul, sol
diers on the Danube, sailors in the Aegean islands, administrators at the imper
ial arsenal and mint, and scribes in Bucharest.18 Parts of these networks could
be mobilized for an exceptionally wide range of pursuits, whether for personal
profit or state gain, the distinction between which grew increasingly fuzzy.19
The period of Phanariot ascendancy (1660s-1821) is one ofthe least under
stood eras with respect to the Ottoman Empire as a whole. Of all the tumultuous
periods in the long history of the Empire, among the most troubled was that
from the 1770s through the 1820s, when the Phanariot ascendancy was most
intense. It brought a transformation in fundamental political relationships
both within Ottoman governance and between the Ottoman Empire and emer
gent European and Eurasian empires. In the Danubian Principalities alone,
16 A passage from Dimitri Cantemir under the heading of "Muhammad's magnanimity" conveys
this understanding of belonging to things Greek: "For I call not them Greeks who are born in
Greece, but those who have transferred the Grecian learning and Institutions to themselves. It is
justly said by Isocrates in one of his Panegyricks, I had rather call them Graecians, who are Par
takers of our Discipline, than those who only share with us the same common birth and nature."
Dimitrie Cantemir. Historian of Southeast European and Oriental Civilizations. Extracts from
"The History ofthe Ottoman Empire, " Alexander Dutu and Paul Cernovodeanu, eds.; N. Tindal,
trans, from Latin (Bucharest: Association internationale d'?tudes du sud-est europ?en, 1973). Can
temir's original work was completed shortly before his death in 1723.
17 See Johann Strauss, "The Millets and the Ottoman Language: The Contribution of Ottoman
Greeks to Ottoman Letters (19th-20th Centuries)," Die Welt des Islams 35, 2: 189-249.
18 This is not to imply these figures were all Phanariots per se (monks, for instance, were not),
but rather to point out that a vast range of contacts was possible through these Phanariot networks.
For example, should a Phanariot need information or goods from a monastery such as
St. Catherine's of Sinai, it was quite easy to establish contact given the many monasteries under
Phanariot control in the principalities that St. Catherine's held.
19 I refrain from referring to these networks as an incipient kind of civil society, in part because
to do so would draw more attention to where the story did not go (toward the formation of a nor
mative liberal democracy, for instance), and cause us to lose sight ofthe many processes that were
underway.
I58 CH RI STIN E PH ILLIOU
three protracted wars took place between 1770 and 1821, and the Napoleonic
Wars were taking place just outside Ottoman domains and across the Mediter
ranean in Ottoman Egypt. Challenges and opportunities were also presented by
equally protracted conflicts between rebel ayan Osman Pasvantoglu of Vidin,
just south of the Wallachian border (the Danube River), ongoing raids of
Kircali brigands in the Rhodope mountains that throughout the 1790s inter
rupted trade and cut off provisioning routes between the Principalities and
Istanbul, and the first and second Serbian uprisings (1804-1813, and 1815).
Indeed, the turbulent reign of Sultan Selim III was the nadir of the old
Ottoman regime and the dawn of an age of state renewal experiments?the
long nineteenth century. For the purposes of this discussion, the state of con
stant flux means that there was no "normal" state of affairs for Phanariot net
works. The interruptions to trade, administration, and virtually all other
sectors of governance could and did include famine, plague, fires, and earth
quakes. With each new conflict, large numbers of civilians fled the cities or
affected rural areas to wait it out, while Phanariot grandees would choose
their side, either gaining employment under the Russian administration of
the Principalities or moving back to Istanbul to serve as translators in the
Ottoman army or for a hiatus in their Phanar villas.20 Each disruption to the
system seemed to present opportunities for individual advancement as well
as new niches for Phanariots as a group. We see this on an individual level
in the life story of Dionysios Photeinos, the Phanariot functionary and historian
whose work we examine below. Photeinos was typical in that he fled the Princi
palities with his patron in the heat of conflict with Russia there in 1808, only to
settle there again after the cessation of hostilities and the reinstitution of
Ottoman-sponsored administration with a higher office and presumably a
reconstituted patronage network.
The greatest disruptions, between 1806 and 1812, led to the greatest restor
ation and indeed the golden age of Phanariot networks, from 1812 until the out
break of Romanian (Tudor Vladimirescu's) and Greek rebellions in 1821. By
1812 peace with Russia had been achieved with the Treaty of Bucharest,21
Mahmud II had taken over the sultanate after the execution of his predecessors
Selim III and Mustafa IV in 1808, and the Phanariot administration ofthe Prin
cipalities resumed. The Russian and Ottoman sovereigns agreed to seven-year
terms for voyvodas and other regulations. Many Muslim-Ottoman supporters of
the New Order reforms were back in office, thus creating an atmosphere amen
able to Phanariot advancement. Many reform supporters had been in the newly
20 Nicholas Soutsos, M?moires du prince Nicolas Soutzo, grand-logoth?te de Moldavie,

1798-1871, publi?s par Panai?oti Rizos (Vienna: Gerold, 1899), 39.
2 ' See F. Ismail, "The Making of the Treaty of Bucharest, 1811-1812," Middle Eastern Studies
15, 2 (1979): 163-92.
formed diplomatic corps, and so had ties of schooling and patronage with
Phanariot grandees going back twenty years and more.
I I I.THE PHANARIOT ASCENDANCY THROUGH THE

LENS OF THE CENTRAL STATE
The intimate link between the rising fortunes of Phanariots and the waves of
crisis in the broader system of Ottoman governance begs the question of
how Phanariots were seen by the sultan and his inner circle of advisors that
made up the central state. That there is no "Phanariot dossier" sitting in the
Ottoman state archives indicates the lack of systematic consideration that Pha
nariots received from their Ottoman superiors. We know that early Phanariot
pioneers such as Alexander Mavrocordatos, appointed minister of the secrets
(ex aporriton) in the wake of his successful performance at the Treaty of
Carlowitz, were the confidantes of earlier sultans. But by the reign of Sultan
Selim III (1789-1808), the latter had developed a deeply conflicting stance
toward what he called the "Phanariot clique" (Fenarh takimi).
In one undated memo written by Sultan Selim to his grand vizier sometime
between 1800 and 1807, the sultan condemns the Phanariot clique for "pursu
ing their own aims and spreading false rumors." He asks his grand vizier, "Why
can't you and your servants take notice and try to put a stop to this?" and
wonders, "Can't anything have an effect on these infidels?" (Bu kafir 1?re hi?
bir sey tesir etmez mil). He goes on to say that this is what can be expected
of this Wallachia and Moldavia set (B?yle ?eyler Eflak ve Bogdan takimindan
?ikar), ordering the vizier to kill those involved in the conspiracy to "open the
eyes" of the others (g?zlerini a?sunlar sonra kenduleri bilur)22
Despite the sense of powerlessness and frustration evident in the sultan's
memo, a draft of an irade from the same period (h. 1216; m. 1801-1802)
declares that appointments to Ottoman embassies in Europe23 will be made
from among the "princes, sons of princes, boyars, and sons of boyars" (beyza
deler ve beyzadeler ogullari ve boyarlar ve boyar evladlarina), all of whom
were part of the existing Wallachia and Moldavia service.24 While appoint
ments to European embassies were never made from Phanariot princes and
boyars exclusively, they did constitute an important contingent of the
" "Kaymakam Paca: Bu g?nlerde Fenarh takimi kendu meramlanni tervi? ic?n gunagun eracif
ve havadis ve m?lgatlar nesr eyledikleri mesmu'm oldu. Bunlann bu hareketi devletime m?zir
oluyor. Nic?n sen ve sair memurin buna dikkat ed?p define say etmiyors[un]uz? Bu kafirlere
hi? bir ?ey tesir etmez mi acaba? Han?erlioglu ibret olmadi mi? B?yle seyler Eflak ve Bogdan taki
mindan ?ikar lakin bunlar benim gayet intikal edecegim seyidir. ?ste bu fesadin d?fi su?lu su?suz
bu kafirlerin ekserini katl ile ?ld?r. Bundan sonra bir ?eyi isjtmeyeyim. Bila-iman c?mlesini katl
ederim. Bunlara sen iyice tenbih ile g?zlerini a?sunlar sonra kend?leri bilur." BOA HAT 13375
(undated).
23 For the establishment of a permanent diplomatic corps under Selim III, see Findley, Bureau
cratic Reform.
24 BOA HAT 13745-A.
l60 CHRISTINE PHILLIOU
diplomatic service under Selim III. The memo outlines specific rules to be put
in place that would weave these Phanariots into the existing bureaucracy, for
instance, their terms of office, how their previous ranks and salaries as drago
man or voyvoda would affect their status when their terms as ambassadors
ended, and who they would be allowed to take with them for staff (including
wives and other family members).25
A third document comes from a slightly later period (h. 1225; m. 1810
1811), just after Sultan Mahmud II took power in the wake of his predecessors
Selim Ill's and Mustafa IV's executions at the hands of janissaries. It is not a
formal document, but rather the scrawl of a high state official trying to pin
down which Phanariot families were allied with which foreign powers, and
indeed which family members were holding which high office at that
moment. It reads, for instance, "They accuse the following of being
Russian-aligned: Moruz Aleksandir Bey?four-time voyvoda; called French
aligned: Su?u [=Soutos] Aleko Bey, currently voyvoda of Wallachia; they
accuse the following of being Russian-aligned: Moruz Bey's second brother
Dimitra?ko, today the dragoman ofthe imperial army."26
Phanariots, whose allegiances were apparently unclear to their Ottoman
superiors, were nevertheless regularly submitting dispatches in Ottoman
Turkish to the highest of state functionaries. In these they relayed the goings-on
of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars just over their borders, or
advised on matters of diplomacy and proper state etiquette toward foreign
powers.27 From the perspective of the official documents they generated that
made it into the Ottoman archives, Phanariots were suppliers of necessary, stra
tegic intelligence to an Ottoman state that was itself becoming increasingly
enmeshed in intra-imperial continental politics. But the documents produced
by officials of the central state portray a far more ambivalent Phanariot role
in the project of imperial governance. On the level of explicit ideology, their
Ottoman superiors seemed unable to fully accommodate Phanariots as a
group (takim; ta'ife) even as the points of engagement between Phanariots
and the matrix of Ottoman governance proliferated.
25 Ibid.
26 BOA HAT 23768 (h. 1225;m. 1810/11): "Rusya taraftarligi ile ittiham ederler: Muruz Alek
sandiri Bey dort defa beyliklere ... Fransa taraftarligi ile mu?tehirdir: Su?u Aleko hala Eflak Voy
vodasinda olarak; Rusya taraftarligi ile ittiham ederler: Moruz Bey'in ikinci karandasi Dimitresko
al-yevm ordu-yu h?mayun terc?mamdir...."
27 See, for example, BOA HAT 13662, for Moruzis' report from Paris ca. 1803; BOA HAT 2443
(h. 1209), for a translation ofthe Spanish consul's (maslahatgiizaf) dispatch on the events involving
Robespierre (Robzpiyer nam sahs) and others in Paris in the summer of 1794; BOA HAT 12565
(h. 1232; m. 1816/17), for Moldavia Voyvoda "Iskerlet's" reports gathered by his spies about
goings-on across the banks of the Pruth River, in Russian territory; and BOA HAT 13081
(h. 1212; m. 1797/98), for news regarding the French Revolution conveyed by Wallachian
Voyvoda Alexander.
COMMUNITIES ON THE VERGE l6l
IV. PERFORMING OTTOMAN GOVERNANCE
A vivid entre into the interconnections between Phanariots and this matrix is
their investiture ceremony,28 one that would have warmed the hearts of both
the Emperor Justinian and Eric Hobsbawm. The ceremony was held for Phanar
iot voyvodas, or princes, leaving Istanbul for their provincial seats of power in
Bucharest and Jassy (now called IasJ). The two voyvoda positions were the
crowning glory of the Phanariot network. Like the offices of grand dragoman
and dragoman ofthe fleet, they were of near royal status.29 But while the drago
mans enjoyed physical proximity to the sultan and his inner circle, the voyvodas
enjoyed free reign in setting taxes and eventually in setting up a civil code in
their respective provinces. They thus could deem themselves autonomous
Christian rulers, even if under the authority of the sultan.
The Danubian Principalities were dubbed by Nicolae Iorga "Byzance apr?s
Byzance," implying that they were a holdover of Christian imperial power. But
as is apparent from the elaborate investiture ceremony, Byzantine iconography
was not ossified but quite thoroughly integrated into and tailored to the
Ottoman political context. Ritualized acts symbolizing affiliation, submission,
and sovereignty were performed at several places in Istanbul, on the road to the
provincial capital, and at significant sites in and around Bucharest or Jassy.
They linked the many groups and locations within Phanariot networks, but
also those networks and the many larger ones of Ottoman governance.
The sequence of ritual events reveals the many sites and actors that melded
Phanariot networks with the larger matrix of Ottoman governance.30 The
28 On ceremonies, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); on Ottoman ceremonial, Giilru Necipoglu, Archi
tecture, Ceremonial, and Power: Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Selim Deringil, "The Invention of Tradition as
Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808-1908," Comparative Studies in Society and
History 35, 1 (1993): 3-29; and Hakan Karateke, ed., An Ottoman Protocol Register Containing
Ceremonies from 1736 to 1808: BEO Sadaret Defterleri 350 in Prime Ministry Ottoman State
Archives, Istanbul (Istanbul: The Ottoman Bank Archive and Research Centre, 2007).
29 In one Ottoman document from ca. 1801 - 1802, it is even declared that these voyvodas were
considered equal in rank to the kings in Europe ("saye-i Padisahide memleketeyn-i merkiimeteyn
voyvodahgi Avrupa 'da kral payesinde itibar olunduguna..."). BOA HAT 13745-A (h. 1216).
30 The ceremony had changed and grown in complexity over time. The version depicted here is
from Dionysios Photeinos' History ofthe Former Dacia, and likely reflects the 1812 investiture
ceremony. This may have been particularly elaborate since it marked the retaking of the Principa
lities by the Ottoman state from Russian control between 1806 and 1812. For descriptions and
analysis of earlier investiture ceremonies, see Christine Philliou, "Worlds, Old and New: Phanariot
Networks and the Remaking of Ottoman Governance, 1800-1850," Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univer
sity, 2004, ch. 1; Radu G. Paun, "Sur l'investiture des derniers princes phanariotes. Autour d'un
document ignore," Revue des ?tudes Sud-Est Europ?ennes XXXV (1997): 63-75; William Wilk
inson, An Account ofthe Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: Including Various Political
Observations Relating to Them (London: n.p., 1829; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1971), 99;
M. P. Zallony, Essai sur les fanariotes, o? l'on voit les causes primitives de leur ?l?vation aux hos
podariats de la Valachie et de la Moldavie, leur mode d'administration, et les causes principles de
leur chute; suivi de quelques r?flexions sur l'?tat actuel de la Gr?ce (Marseille: A. Ricard, 1824).
162 CHRISTINE PH1LLI0U
Istanbul portion of the ceremony began with a ritualized invitation ceremony to

summon the initiate and transport him by water along the Golden Horn from his
Phanar residence to the grand vizier's quarters near Topkapi Palace.31 At this
point the initiate would already have selected his cabinet, the retinue of
twelve or more officials who would follow him to his post and man his
upper administration. Together they would meet with the grand vizier and
secure his official appointment in preparation for the investiture ceremony
the following day. On the way back to his Phanar residence the initiate and
his now sizable procession, including Ottoman military figures, a military
marching band, and his own retinue, would stop for a benediction ceremony
at the Patriarchate complex, also in the Phanar district, during which the
Patriarch and the members of his Holy Synod would approve the voyvoda's
appointment.32
The investiture ceremony continued the next day at Topkapi Palace, took
several hours and included a ritualized meal. Accepting the sultan's food had
since the gazi days been an Ottoman sign of loyalty to the sultan, which is
why, when the janissaries rebelled, they banged pots, and why the Topkapi
Palace was designed so that the smoke from the chimneys, giving visual
form to the fact that so many people in the palace were accepting the
sultan's food, could be seen from far away. In the Phanariot ceremony a
special soup was shared with representatives of the Janissary Corps
(Ottoman infantry) in the palace's outer courtyard. The symbolism of sharing
this meal was manifold. Not only would Phanariots be responsible for
feeding the janissaries that went on campaign, but also, it seems, for working
with those that doubled as merchants in the peacetime state-administered
grain trade from the Principalities to Istanbul via the ports of the Danube and
Black Sea.33 Cooperation was signified by the act of sharing a meal?janis
saries formed ocaks, or units, that cooked and ate together?and in this way
the Phanariot initiate was being inducted into that community as well. This
portion of the ceremony even included the initiate being shown the esame
defteri, or pay register of the janissaries, and "giving assent" to it.34
The core moment of the ceremony was the encounter with the sultan, which
was carefully staged and similar in many ways to audiences that foreign ambas
sadors would have with the Ottoman sovereign. This demonstrated the dual
31 Confirming Photeinos' description, Sultan Selim III orders in a note to his grand vizier that if
Aleko, the son-in-law of the reigning Moldavian voyvoda and the current kapiketh?dasi of Molda
via, is to be appointed dragoman of the fleet, then the following evening an "inviter" should be sent
to him and the following day the ceremony should commence. BOA HAT 7872.
~ Photeinos, History of the Former Dacia, vol. 3, 418.
33 Alexandrescu-Dersca-Bulgaru "Les rapports ?conomiques," 317-26.
Photeinos, History of the Former Dacia, vol. 3, 419-20.
nature of Phanariot voyvodas as both autonomous rulers and administrator

subjects ofthe sultan. Such a similarity made sense in that Phanariot voyvodas
were deemed autonomous rulers and thus came under the authority ofthe chief
scribe, or foreign minister, rather than the Kahya Bey, or interior minister.
A document, known as a telhis, would be delivered to the sultan asking for
an audience, and the sultan would sign off, allowing the initiate to be escorted
in.35 The sultan would vest the voyvoda with the kaftan and kuka hat that sym
bolized his office and recite a pact to which the initiate would agree: "The
arrangement demanded of you from my imperial pantries [coffers] is this:
you bring back news from the European parts; the voyvodaship of Wallachia
is granted to you with full autonomy, immunity, and plenipotentiary powers:
in return your loyalty is demanded."36
The very apex ofthe Phanariot network, then, was held in place by a contrac
tual relationship to the person of the sultan: the voyvoda was to supply infor
mation from Europe and remain loyal to the sultan, while being allowed the
freedom?that is, the autonomy and immunity?to rule his Principality as he
pleased. In practice this meant that he was to maintain a many-tiered relation
ship to the merchants, soldiers, and officials ofthe Ottoman system.
The initiate would then travel once again back to his residence in the Phanar
and assemble his Princely Council, making the preparations for a journey of
several weeks or more, depending on the weather conditions, to Bucharest or
Jassy. After completing these preparations he would set off with a procession
of hundreds and be cheered by hundreds more as he departed the capital and
went on to make ritualized rest stops at particular villages and towns along
the way. This was a peacetime mimicry of the many military campaigns
(replete with military marching music for the duration) that had not long
before traversed the same lands to fight ay an, Russians, or Austrians.
When the new Wallachian voyvoda's procession neared Bucharest it would
stop at the Vacaresti Monastery on the city's outskirts, assemble, and prepare
for the entrance into the city and the arrival at the voyvoda's court that adjoined
the city's cathedral.37 While the church was a minor presence in the Istanbul
portion of the ceremony, it took center stage in the provincial portion, with
the monastery and cathedral acting as pivotal sites, tolling church bells repla
cing the Ottoman military music, and the Archbishop maintaining continuity
between voyvodas and greeting the new initiate upon his arrival in the city.
The voyvoda would greet representatives of the various local social strata
and his cabinet, and hold a reception at his new palace replete with coffee,
35 For an example of a telhis, see BOA HAT 5530 (h. 1216; ca. 1801-1802).
36 "Killed hiimayunum, dikkat eylen [sic] rabitasini senden matlub olunur. Avrupa tarafindan
havadis yeti?tiresin, Eflak voyvodahgi menk?Ti serbestiyet ?zere sana nasp olundu, sadakatin
matlup olunur." Photeinos, History ofthe Former Dacia, vol. 3, 422.
37 Ibid., 483.
sweets, and hookah pipe. His wife, whose title was domna, held a reception in
her salon for the ladies of the retinue. Thus a ceremony that had begun in the
sultan's chamber in Istanbul was ended in the voyvoda's personal court in
Bucharest. In the final act, the new voyvoda vested his new officials with
kaftans, mimicking his own investiture with the kaftan and kuka hat by the
sultan.39
V. WAR AND PEACE IN THE LIFE OF A PHANARIOT
Historian-political scientist Paschalis Kitromilides has integrated social and

intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Balkans, and in so doing has
gone the furthest toward contextualizing the Phanariot ascendancy. He
probes the world of southeastern Europe, which he says was "not yet national"
but was Orthodox Christian, with Greek language enjoying primacy.40 Kitromi
lides' purpose is to explore the "Southeast European Enlightenment," and he
does so by focusing on the region's intellectual and ecclesiastical history.
Within this framework, he quotes from a contemporary source that condemns
Phanariots and their Wallachian boyar partners, and says they were merely
"imitating] the customs of the Ottomans and behaving like 'European
Turks' in their daily life."41 From the perspective ofthe Southeast European
Enlightenment this comment seems clearly pejorative, given that the
Ottoman context is treated as a political and cultural void. But from another
vantage, that of Ottoman governance, such comments evince the political
acculturation of Phanariots into the logic and structures of Ottoman govern
ance. Such acculturation must have indeed seemed shameful or backward to
those who increasingly saw themselves as part of a new, enlightened intellec
tual and socio-political movement, and it was they and their successors that
wrote the national histories of this region.
It was not Ottoman officials that provided us with painstakingly detailed
descriptions of the Phanariot investiture ceremony I have just summarized,
but rather a mid-level Phanariot functionary, himself a product and beneficiary
ofthe Phanariot ascendancy?none other than Dionysios Photeinos. Moreover,
it is his 1819 work that Kitromilides quotes from. Photeinos' life story displays
the integration process at the turn ofthe nineteenth century writ small. While he
did make the disparaging comment about Phanariots and their Wallachian part
ners, he was part of their administration, and a part-time court historian for the
Phanariot voyvoda of Wallachia at that time. A few words about his trajectory
will illuminate the structures and contingencies that shaped Phanariot horizons.
38 Ibid., 445-46.
39 Ibid., 446-47.
40 Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek
Culture in the Eighteenth Century? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
41 Kitromilides, Enlightenment, 93; op. cit. Dionysios Photeinos, History ofthe Former Dacia,
vol. 3, 174.
Dionysios Photeinos was born in 1769 in Patras, overlooking what

was Ottoman Morea, known in Greek as the P?loponn?se, and his ancestors
were from the nearby P?loponn?se (hence his epithet Dionysios Photeinos
ho Peloponnesios)42 His father, Athanasios Photeinos, had moved the
family to Istanbul since he was the physician of Sultan Abdiilhamit I
(r. 1774-1789) until that sultan's death in 1789. At that point, the family
moved back to the P?loponn?se, but Dionysios, now in his early twenties,
soon returned to Istanbul to continue his studies. From there he continued on
to Wallachia around 1799.43
Once he arrived in Bucharest, Photeinos gave music lessons, for in
addition to his work as a historian he was also a cantor in the Orthodox
Church and composed hymns. The combination of government service,
history-writing, and music and poetry composition was typical of Photei
nos' Muslim-Ottoman counterparts, not to mention his Romanian-Phanariot
predecessor Dimitrie Cantemir.44 Photeinos entered the "court" (or service
of the voyvoda) as a "simple bataphos (vataf overseer) of the Divan,"
under the protection of the Grand Bano (ban) Dimitraki Ghikas, in
whose house he resided, perhaps as tutor for his children or simply a
member of his household.45 With his patron Dimitraki Ghikas he fled
the rebel ayan Pasvantoglu during the reign of Michael Soutsos (in
1802), and later returned, still at the side of Ghikas, the boyar, with
whose support he rose in the hierarchy of the princely retinue. He
achieved offices in the Divan, such as one overseeing its lucrative salt
mines.
In 1808, while Wallachia was under Russian administration (1806-1812),
the Ottoman central state in Istanbul was in profound disarray, and Constantine
42 For biographical information, see Nicholas Svoronos, "Dionysios Photeinos kai to historiko
ergo autou" [Dionysios Photeinos and his historical work], Hellenika 9 (1936): 133-78.
43 According to Svoronos, "following the custom of many/most educated Greeks ofthe time."
There is some inconsistency with the chronology provided by Svoronos. For instance, Svoronos
places Photeinos in Wallachia in 1786, although Sultan Abd?lhamit was still alive at this time. Svor
onos quotes others as placing Photeinos in Wallachia in 1804, and 1801, when he dedicates an
unpublished collection of ecclesiastical hymns to Constantine Filipescu. Photeinos himself writes
(in vol. 2 of History ofthe Former Dacia, 431) that he left Wallachia in 1802 along with Dimitrios
Ghikas, due to the attacks of Osman Pasvantoglu, and in the Prologue to History of the Former
Dacia (as of 1817, or 1818 at the latest) Photeinos tells us that he had already been in the Princi
palities for eighteen years, placing him there as of 1799. This chronology is confirmed by his
seemingly eyewitness account (in verse) of the tragic death of Prince Hantzeris (=Hancerlioglu)
that year.
44 Dimitri Cantemir (1673-1723) was a pivotal figure for the Phanariot and Moldo-Wallachia
story. It was his flight to Russia while serving as voyvoda of Moldavia that prompted the
Ottoman decision to shift from indigenous boyars to Istanbul-based Phanariots for the positions
of prince of the twin Principalities. Cantemir distinguished himself also through his History of
the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, and through his establishment of a notation
system for Ottoman music.
45 Svoronos, "Dionysios Photeinos," 140.
Hypsilantis had been expelled as voyvoda. The administration had been

reorganized and many ofthe "special" offices ofthe prince had been abolished.
The significant income extracted from the provinces was no longer distributed
among these special offices, but now concentrated in the hands of one archon,
who each year reported and passed the income on to one official, the grand
vestiar. Photeinos was apparently designated as this archon for one year of
the Russian occupation, the first of several indications that he was operating
in the fields of both Russian and Ottoman governance.
In 1812, on the eve ofthe reinstitution of Ottoman-Phanariot administration
in the Principalities, Photeinos was appointed ispravnik41 in the district of Gia
lomitza, likely by the Grand Bano and General-Major Kostaki Ghikas, who had
himself been appointed "President ofthe Divan" by the Russian ?i?akov. Pho
teinos remained in this office until the arrival of the Ottoman-Phanariot
Voyvoda Karaca. We know that he must have served in some official capacity
from 1812 until the publication of his history in 1818-1819, and therefore
survived politically the transition from Russian to Ottoman rule in the
Principalities, but we do not know precisely how. In 1818 he reveals in corre
spondence to his editor-publisher Zinovios Pop that he was waiting for a pro
motion to come through, and thus cannot yet refer to his title in his book.
During this time he was on the outs with Prince Karaca because of a satire
he had composed that targeted him, but the prince apparently forgave Photeinos
when he saw the published first volume ofthe history in 1818, at which time he
awarded him the title of Grand Serdar.48
In these years, in addition to engaging in political maneuvering and career
advancement, Photeinos worked on two histories. One was the fascinating
three-volume History ofthe Former Dacia (Historia tes Palai Dakias) that is
under discussion here; the other, never completed, was a history of the
Ottoman sultans from Mehmed II to Mahmud 49 At first glance, Photeinos'
46 The Hypsilantis family was Russian-aligned, and members of the family would go on to
spearhead the Greek rebellions in 1821, first in Moldavia, and then after the failure there, in the
P?loponn?se, where the rebellions eventually succeeded. See Sturdza, Dictionnaire, 468-73;
Mihai Tipau, Domnii Fanariotii, 94-105.
47 The office of ispravnik was akin to that of regional governor; according to Photeinos' descrip
tion, something between a voyvoda and a kadi "in Turkey." Photeinos, History ofthe Former Dacia,
vol.3, 509.
48 Svoronos notes that this promotion, according to Photeinos, was not made out of good will,
but out of Karaca's fear that Photeinos would malign him in subsequent volumes of the history.
Consequently, when Karaca abandoned his position as prince and left the Principalities in
October of 1818, Photeinos wrote to his editor Zinovio Pop and requested he send him back the
manuscript so he could correct the chapter dealing with the reign of Karaca. The second volume
had already gone to press the month before. This prompted Photeinos to describe the "tyrannical"
and "Machiavellian" conditions of Karaca's reign to Pop (Svoronos, "Dionysios Photeinos," 142).
49 Photeinos died sometime between 1821 and 1824 in Bucharest. We find in February 1824 one
Vasilios Dimitriou Photeinos, "nephew of the deceased Serdar Dionysios Photeinos," receiving
1700 florins from a member ofthe Balasa (Balche) family for a property of Dionyisios' in Walla
chia. Ecumenical Patriarchate of Istanbul Archives, outgoing correspondence, Codex IE', p. 116.
use of Dacia in the title of his completed oeuvre for Moldavia, Wallachia, and
Transylvania seems odd, since the name is neither the Ottoman demarcation of
the area nor a national category, but rather a Roman administrative label. But it
also evokes Russian Empress Catherine the Great and Habsburg Emporor
Joseph IPs "Greek plan," of a few decades earlier, to create an independent
kingdom out of Moldavia and Wallachia under that name.50 The reference to
Dacia in the title, together with much of the content of Photeinos' history,
betrays not only a classicizing tendency typical of his well-educated contempor
aries to the north and west but also an elaborate if incipient imagination emerging
from Phanariot involvement in Ottoman governance. This imagination was
neither national in the sense that would emerge in the course of the nineteenth
century, nor simply an Orthodox Christian commonwealth vision of uniting
with Russia and resuscitating Byzantium.51 Instead, Photeinos narrates the
history of Dacia as a geographic entity and administrative district, peopled and
ruled by a succession of groups over the ages. (He begins with the area's first
human habitation as narrated by historians in the fourth century B.c.) By the
third volume, which begins with the founding of the Principality of Moldavia in
the fourteenth century and covers the entire Ottoman period (from the four
teenth-nineteenth centuries), and particularly when he reaches the events and
reigns he personally witnessed, the descriptions are, as one would expect, more
detailed and complex in their presentations of Ottoman and Phanariot politics.
Particularly striking in Photeinos' description of Dacia and Phanariot
administration of it in his own time is the pride with which he notes the
status of Phanariot voyvodas within the Ottoman system. For instance, he
writes braggingly about investiture by the sultan and the Ottoman symbols
of the voyvodas' position. (For example, they enjoyed the rank of
two-and-a-half horsetails?the highest being three horsetails for the grand
vizier.)52 When describing the succession of civil conflicts in 1807-1808, he
alternates between the battlefront against Russia in the Danubian Principalities
and the conflict in Istanbul between central state loyalists and rebel janissaries
and others. He claims at several points that inhabitants of all religions and
classes united to defend the Empire against Russia.53
50 David Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (London: Longman, 1994), 42; Shaw,
Between Old and New, 22.
5 ' The key to understanding lies perhaps in the multiple meanings of the term "Romaios"
(T. Rum), meaning Roman (and by extension what we would call Byzantine) and Orthodox
Christian subject ofthe Ottoman sultan (The term is also a geographic signifier for what we now
call Anatolia [Rum], in Arabic and Persian, and for what we now call the Balkans [Rumeli] for
the Ottomans). It would seem, then, that Photeinos, and presumably his fellow Phanariots, took
the connection to the Roman Empire seriously and were implying that their patrimony was not a
Byzantine (in the Greek national sense) one but instead a Roman (imperial) one.
52 Photeinos, History ofthe Former Dacia, vol. 3, 426-27.
53 Ibid., vol. 2, 488-558.
VI.THE MILLET SYSTEM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Historians have not generally examined Phanariots and their Muslim-Ottoman

counterparts within the same framework. Beyond preoccupations with military
and institutional levels of governance, this lacuna reflects larger assumptions
about inter-confessional relations. The system of millets?confessional
nations that were the basis for Ottoman administration?has been a subject
of debate over the past generation. Some say non-Muslims inhabited their
own autonomous communities and had little interaction with the Muslim
state apparatus. Others say there was no consistent millet entity until the Tan
zimat reforms ofthe mid-nineteenth century. The very terms of this debate, like
those ofthe debate over the New Order (Nizam-i Cedid) reforms, reflect a pre
occupation with formal institutional and legal definitions. Certainly in the legal
arena there were basic divisions between Muslims, as adherents of the ruling
state religion, and Christians and Jews, who enjoyed the in-between status of
zimmi, or People ofthe Book, both protected and shunned as second-class sub
jects. That said, institutional and legal definitions tell us little ofthe social rea
lities of Ottoman governance, particularly at century's turn when formal
institutions were in profound crisis.
This is not to deny that the Orthodox Church apparatus and doctrines had a
tremendous impact on the lives of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, or that
their identity may have been first and foremost as Christians in a Muslim
dominated state. Recruitment into Phanariot networks occurred through
Church affiliations, in addition to family relations and more formal schooling
opportunities in the Principalities and elsewhere.
The list of subscribers to Dionysios Photeinos' three-volume History ofthe
Former Dacia attests to the intricacies within the sphere of Orthodox Christian
ity ofthe Ottoman Empire. One ofthe many fascinating aspects of Photeinos'
work on Moldavia and Wallachia was the list, or katalogos, of "philokalon kai
philomouson syndrometon" or "subscribers who were lovers of beauty and
letters" that precedes the history. In it we see traces of the processes of socia
lization and acculturation into a Phanariot?and by extension Ottoman?
political culture that he and many others were part of. It includes approximately
350 individuals, divided into forty categories, which together form a socio
political portrait of what I am calling the Phanariot network, in the 1810s.
This portrait reveals both identity and difference within the world of Orthodox
Christian Ottoman subjects, as well as between that world and the larger
Ottoman world in which it was embedded.
The categories are organized at once hierarchically, geographically, and by
profession. Presiding at the top of the list are the "Most High and Pious
Princes (hegemones)" which include the reigning Phanariot Prince of Molda
via Scarlatos Voyvodas Alexandrou Voyvoda Kallimaki (r. 1812-1819), and
the two Phanariots who were vying for the vacant throne of Wallachia at that
moment: Alexandras Voyvoda Soutsos and Alexandras Voyvoda Hantzeris.

After this most illustrious group comes the geographical designation
"in Bucharest," made up first of a beyzade (son of a prince) and two major gen
erals, then twenty-one categories of officials ofthe Wallachian princely admin
istration. Sixteen of these groups of officials are also called "archons," and their
subdivisions include a combination of Romanian, Byzantine-ecclesiastical, and
Turkish titles, from banoi,54 vorniks, and kloutziarides, to logethetes and
megaloi vestiaroi, to agas and serdars?reflecting the range of idioms?
Greek, Romanian, and Turkish among them?that were being melded into
this Phanariot world. After these official functionaries come the professions:
"o/ exohotatoi giatroi" (his excellencies the doctors), the "timiotatoi pragma
teutai" (the most honorable merchants), the "ellogimiotatoi didaskaloF (the
most lettered/learned teachers), and finally, the members of the "ierou
katalogou" or clergy.
After this assemblage of social groups in Bucharest comes a mixed social
group of fourteen, all in Craiova (a commercial city west of Bucharest), and
then six distinguished Constantinopolitan archons, including the current
grand dragoman of the "Ruling Ottoman Kingdom," Michael Soutsos, the
former Grand Dragoman Iakovos Argyropoulos, and the Grand Postelniks55
Iakovos Rizos-Neroulos (with his four sons) and Alexandras Mavrocordatos.
The Istanbuliote subscribers are sandwiched between the categories of Buchar
est and Jassy, the latter being Moldavia's capital. The categories of officials in
Moldavia mirror those in Wallachia in that they are organized hierarchically,
although they display some extra categories, such as the archontes megaloi
postelnikoi (quasi-foreign ministers), and there are fewer officials (fifty-seven
names) than Wallachia (about 150 names). Moldavia was territorially
smaller, which would account for some of this difference. Finally, there are
four final, geographic categories?"in Galatz" (a port city on the Danube in
Moldavia?containing six names), in P?loponn?se (four names), in Patras
(Paliai Patrai?eighteen names), and in Vienna (three names, one of whom
is noted as having subscribed through an acquaintance in Wallachia).
The subscriber categories reveal that there was both an explicit structure
associated with Phanariot rule?expressed in the hierarchy of offices under
the two Phanariot voyvodas?and an implicit social and geographical structure
which held the Principalities to the Ottoman capital and to particular localities
such as the P?loponn?se, and even?at least through a few individuals?to
Vienna (the only city mentioned from outside Ottoman domains). But
how did individuals fit into and, presumably, move through this structure?
54 Ban?highest ranking of the indigenous boyars.

Postelnik was analogous to foreign minister: see Photeinos, History of the Former Dacia,
vol. 3, 485: "O M?^as Uoctt?Xvlkos?Otrros e?vca Ka0'carr? tou t|7 |jl?vo<; jjllvlcttpos t?)v
e?;?)T plK?)V \nTo6?cre?)v."
To address this question, we can examine this same subscriber list as a snapshot
of 350 individuals at particular locations on their way up the hierarchy.
Kitromilides demonstrates his argument about the not-yet-national southeast
European Enlightenment through the life of one Iosipos Moisodax (ca. 1725 ?
1800). Moisiodax was an Orthodox Christian of Vlach-speaking origins from
today's northern Bulgaria. Like many of his fellow countrymen that engaged
in trade in central Europe he became Hellenized, and he entered the Orthodox
Christian clergy, where knowledge of Greek, the language of the Church and
letters, was a necessity. This process of Hellenization was hardly unique to
Moisiodax, whose case reinforces the earlier arguments of scholars such as
Traiain Stoianovich regarding the Hellenization of Bulgarian-, Romanian-,
Vlach-, Albanian-, and Serbian-speaking Christians as a vehicle for social
mobility into the Balkan Christian mercantile classes in the eighteenth
century.56 However, neither Kitromilides nor Stoianovich focus their attentions
on the Ottoman context; rather, they are more interested in how the motivation
to learn Greek and, for some, to identify oneself as culturally "Greek" had to do
with entering Christian merchant networks and/or the Christian clergy.
Linking this world of Greek/Hellenized merchants and clergy to the larger
world of Ottoman governance allows us to see an additional dimension?not
only the daily social and political realities of these Balkan Christians as
Ottoman subjects, but also the symbolic, cultural, and political connections
that were forged between Phanariot retinues and networks on the one hand,
and elements of what is considered Ottoman governance "proper" on the
other. That more complete picture, in turn, reveals that another career path
was taking shape for Orthodox Christians in the late eighteenth century: the
path into the retinues of Phanariot princes and dragomans. This, like the
paths to commerce and the clergy, necessitated Hellenization, for the Greek
language enjoyed primacy among the Phanariot nomenklatura, as it did
in the Greek Orthodox Church and in the networks of Greek merchants.
Hellenization meant learning Greek letters, but also changing one's name to
fit Greek linguistic and cultural conventions.
We can draw from many real-world examples of humbler Christians joining
the ranks of Phanariot retinues. Returning to Photeinos' list of subscribers, the
most famous examples are the princes themselves: Scarlatos Voyvodas Alexan
drou Voyvoda Kallimaki. The Kallimaki family was originally Romanian
speaking, and Hellenized into the Phanariot elite in the later seventeenth
century. They were thus well placed to qualify for the office of prince when
"indigenous" Romanian boyars were ousted from power and Phanariots
gained ascendancy in ruling the Principalities in the second decade of the
56 Tra?an Stoianovich, "The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant," in Economies and

Societies: Traders, Towns, and Households, Vol. 2 of Between East and West: The Balkan and
Mediterranean Worlds (New Rochelle: A. D. Caratzas Publishers, 1993).
COMMUNITIES ON THE VERGE I7I
eighteenth century. The Ghikas family, also listed in the top category, and
therefore top echelon of Phanariot society, had migrated from "Albania" to
the Ottoman capital in the seventeenth century. Their ancestor Georgios was
said to have been a childhood friend of Mehmed K?pr?l?, founder of the
K?pr?l? Dynasty of grand viziers that was credited with restoring Ottoman
power in the second half of the seventeenth century.58 In a striking parallel
between processes of social mobility among Christians and Muslim converts
from Christianity, the Albanian Ghikas family remained Christian but
Hellenized, while the Albanian (T. Arnavut) Mehmed K?pr?l? was a Muslim
convert from Christianity who then assimilated into the Ottoman ruling class
through the slave (devsirme-kul) system. A biographer of the Ghikas family
suggests Georgios joined Mehmed K?pr?l?'s faction in Istanbul in 1653, and
achieved commercial and political successes with the latter's support.59
It was not just the most famous and powerful Phanariots that were shifting
"ethnic" identities within the bounds of Orthodox Christianity.60 Common
on the list are Hellenized Romanian names such as Nicholaos Philippeskos
(archon aga of Bucharest, and an important patron of Photeinos') or Pavlos
Patreskos (archon serdar). There are also Hellenized names of possibly
more complicated origins, such as Konstantinos Tattareskos (containing the
word "Tatar" with a Hellenized Romanian -escu ending), Scarlatos Tzerkezis
(a Hellenized -is ending to the Turkish designation for a Circassian (?erkez),
Scarlatos Stoigianneskos (Stoian, a common Serbian/Slavic name, Hellenized
into Stoigiannes, with Romanian -escu and a Greek -os), and Ioannitzas
Tsalikovitz (Greek rendering of the Serbian/Slavic "-ov/c/z" ending to the
Turkish ?elik, meaning steel).
Other names indicate origins geographically remote from the Danubian
Principalities. One example is of a man of possibly Turkish-speaking Christian
origins, Radoukanos Karamanlis (denoting origins in central Anatolia, where
Christian populations were overwhelmingly turcophone). Another is Gregorios
Mavrodoglous (a Hellenized Turkish -oglu ending common among the
Karamanli of Anatolia). There are even names of Armenian origins, such as
Gregorios Balianos (archon m?galos vornik) (also known as Krikor amira
Balyan [1764-1831], the Armenian palace architect for the Ottoman state
and the father of Garabed amira Balyan, architect of Dolmabah?e Palace in
57 Sturdza, Dictionnaire, 245-47. If we go even further back, the Kallimaki family traces its
origins back to Poland and apparently settled in the Principalities and "Romanized" before "Helle
nizing." See Mihai Tipau, Domnii Fanariotii, 49-60.
58 Ibid., 297.
59 Ibid.
60 It should be kept in mind that in many cases these name changes did not constitute an irre
versible and complete change of identity (since many shifted the endings of their names depending
on the context, reverting back to Slavic when in a Slavic milieu, etcetera). But it is clear that there
existed a Phanariot-dominated arena wherein names of non-Greek origins were altered to fit the
context.
the mid-nineteenth century)61 and the Archon Logothetes Gregorios

Baltzianos, not to mention those of closer-to-home Vlach origins such as
Archon Grammatikos Manouel Vlachides. Finally, there is at least one name
with known Bulgarian-language origins, Stephanos Vogorides (who had
changed his name from his birth name, Stoiko Tsonkovich, in the 1790s),
and there are several with indications of geographic origins, such as the
Archon Serdar Georgios Laskari Peloponnesios (from the P?loponn?se), the
"eugenestatos kyrios Andreas Soteriou Lontou ek Vostitsis" (from Vostitsa),
ellogimiotatos didaskalos Demetrios Ithakesios ("the most learned teacher
Demetrios from the island of Ithaka," placed among those on the list living
in the port town of Galatz), and the Archon Hatman of Bucharest Konstantinos
Karydes ho Kyprios (the Cypriot).
I offer these many examples to show, first, that Hellenization was going on
beyond the spheres of commerce and the clergy, which have heretofore been
the focus of scholarship.62 But these examples also illustrate the ways that
the Phanariot administration of Ottoman Moldavia and Wallachia was
serving as a portal for Orthodox Christians?of both Greek- and
non-Greek-speaking origins?to enter the world ofthe Phanariot, and by exten
sion Ottoman governance. Their titles, though derived from Byzantine Church
and Romanian contexts as well as Ottoman-Turkish sources, were important to
their names and identities, and in most cases a Hellenized name was a prerequi
site to belonging in the Ottoman imperial administration, through employment
in a Phanariot retinue. And in addition to their "day jobs" as voyvodas, vestiars,
or agas, at least 350 of them seemed to be subscribing to and reading works of
history that reflected their social and political outlook, as Christian Ottoman
subjects and Phanariot functionaries associated with Moldavia and/or
Wallachia.
There were not only multiple strata but also multiple processes of social
mobility underway between these strata, all within the Orthodox Christian
sphere. So far, this only reinforces the millet system paradigm that places Chris
tians in separate, autonomous confessional communities, set apart from
Muslims and from participation in Ottoman governance. In addition,
however, to the social and "ethnic" mobility practiced by humbler Orthodox
Christians at work under Phanariot princes, the princes themselves were hard
at work striving for Ottoman cultural and political status and linking up with
the larger world of Ottoman governance. Lest we think that Phanariots were
focused solely on resuscitating Byzantium and creating an Orthodox Christian
commonwealth, we must consider the connections between Phanariot elites and
the Muslim-Ottoman ruling class "proper" in the sphere of cultural/literary
61 See Pars Tuglaci, Osmanli mimarhginda batddasma d?nemi ve Balyan Ailes i [Westernization
and the Balyan family in Ottoman architecture] (Istanbul: Yeni ?igir Kitabevi, 1990), 5, passim.
62 Reflected in the work of Traian Stoianovich and Paschalis Kitromilides, respectively.
production. In 1808, Iskerletzade Aleko commissioned a nasihatname,

meaning "advice literature," a work belonging to the very Persian-Ottoman
genre of Mirrors for Princes. His name is the Ottoman-Turkish rendition of
Alexandras Scarlatou Kallimaki, likely the father of Scarlatos Voyvodas
Alexandrou Kallimaki, the reigning prince of Moldavia in Photeinos' 1818
list of subscribers. This nasihatname was written in Ottoman Turkish, and fol
lowed precisely the formula of works composed for and commissioned by
Muslim Ottoman dignitary-patrons at the time.63 Furthermore, one need only
look at the churches that Phanariot princes had built in Moldavia and Wallachia
throughout the eighteenth century to see their striking resemblance to contem
porary Ottoman pavilions and other structures in Istanbul. The same was true of
the villas Phanariots were building along the Bosphorus in the eighteenth
century alongside those of Muslim Ottoman grandees.64
Phanariots were also using Muslim Ottoman officials and patronage to climb
the social ladder. For example, in h. 1215 (ca. 1800-1801), one Manolaki, who
had served in the retinue of Ismail Ferruh Efendi since his time as Ottoman
envoy in England, and was now among the kapikethiidasts, or representatives
to the Ottoman Court of Wallachia, wrote a petition for his son Yanko. Yanko
was a dragoman of unspecified rank, and his father Manolaki was petitioning to
arrange his pay schedule with the chief accountant.65 Another case shows
Sultan Selim III pondering, in another note to his grand vizier in h. 1220
(ca. 1805-1806) whether to admit Kallimaki Bey, then voyvoda of Moldavia,
into the retinue of [Alemdar] Mustafa Pasha, a pivotal figure in the upheaval of
1807-1808.66
And what would patronage be without gifts? In addition to the official taxes
in kind to be collected from the Principalities and sent to the capital by the voy
vodas and their administration, voyvodas were under many other obligations,
such as to give annual holiday (aidiye) cash gifts to no less than sixty-nine
high Ottoman officials, according to the h. 1212 (ca. 1797-1798) register.
Totalling 30,000 kuru?67 these gifts ranged from 8,500 kuru? to the grand
6" At the same time, that Kallimaki chose to commission a nasihatname begs the question of
whether he saw himself as a sovereign in need of advice, or accepted that the sultan was the
only sovereign. This question is complicated further by the fact that the work was commissioned
in 1808, just after the janissaries had executed Sultan Selim III and Sultan Mahmud took the
throne as a young boy. It is an open question whether Kallimaki was hoping to usurp a greater
share of sovereign power, albeit in an Ottoman idiom.
64 Tiilay Artan, "Architecture as a Theater of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth-Century
Bosphorus," Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989.
6? BOA Cevdet Hariciye 6632.
66 BOA HAT 7560: "D?n s?yledigim gibi Kallimaki Beyi sjmdilik Bogdan Voyvodasi namiyle
Mustafa Pasa maiyyetine irsal olunmasi bana m?nasib g?r?nuyor. M?lahaza eyliy?b m?nasib ise
irsal edesin."
67 The kurus was suffering severe devaluation at this time (post-1760). About ten or eleven kurus,
were worth one Venetian ducat in 1810. See ?evket Pamuk, "Evolution ofthe Ottoman Monetary
System," Part Vof An Economic and Social History ofthe Ottoman Empire, Vol. 2, 1600-1914.
vizier down to 30 kurus. to the Kaftan-keeper and his assistant. Each time an
appointment or promotion occurred there were specific payments to be made.
For instance, when Todoraki, the older son of Tugsuz Kamara?,69 was rec
ommended for appointment as an apprentice (?irak) dragoman, 20,000 kurus.
were offered to the grand vizier, 10,000 to the kapudan pasa, and a little
present (hediyecik) to his servants, with Todoraki's future service being his
gift to the keth?da bey (interior minister) and reis efendi (foreign minister).70
To recap, Photeinos' life and the list of subscribers display some ofthe fixed
social categories and dynamic processes of social and concomitant "ethnic"
mobility within the Orthodox Christian subject population in the early nine
teenth century. The other examples I have presented indicate a few of the con
nections between Phanariot elites and their contemporaries in the
Muslim-Ottoman ruling class. Taken together, a picture emerges of leading
Phanariot dignitaries and their client-retinues as links between, first, the Ortho
dox Christian Church and subject populations, and second, several aspects of
Ottoman governance, including Court politics, the Sublime Porte, foreign
relations, military administration, provincial administration, tax farming, and
even guild affairs.71
VII . PHAN ARIOTS-AND OTHER OTTOMANS?

Situating Phanariots within the larger matrix of Ottoman governance and com
paring them with their Muslim-Ottoman janissary, ay an, or even courtier
counterparts, is something of a departure from the terms of current historio
graphy for the early-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire.72 There are good
Halil ?nalcik with Donald Quataert, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 945-80.
Providing some comparative perspective on the value of 30,000 kurus, Ariel Salzmann notes in her
Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire (p. Ill) that "a governor from Aleppo spent 126,830 kurus for
ten months in office over the years 1781 and 1782."
68 BOA HAT 12550-A: "Senede bir defa Eflak ve Bogdan voyvodalan taraflanndan nakit olarak
Enderun-e h?mayuna irsali emr-i h?mayun buyurulan: kurus. 30,000... ."
69 Kamaras was the name of a rank in the Phanariot administration; tugsuz means one without a
horsetail (tug), which was another indicator of rank.
70 BOA HAT 14731 (h. 1210; m. 1795/96). For an even more comprehensive list of "Bayram
peske?" given by the voyvoda to the Ottoman Palace in the 1780s, see Athanasiou Komnenou
Hypsilantou, Ekklesiastikon kai politikon ton eis dodeka biblion H', Th' kai F etoi Ta Meta ten
Alosin (1453?1789), ek cheirographou anekdotou tes hieras mones tou Sina) Ekdidontas
Archim. Germanou Afthonidou Sinaitou [Ecclesiastical and political events from after the fall
(1453-1789) in twelve books from an unpublished manuscript in the Monastery of
[St. Catherine's of] Sinai, published by Archimandrite Germanos Afthonides of Sinai] (Athens:
Bibl. Note Karavia, 1972), 793-96.
71 For prohibitions on provincial dragomans' activities in tax farming and guild politics, see
Christine Philliou, "Mischief in the Old Regime: Provincial Dragomans and Social Change at
the Turn ofthe Nineteenth Century," New Perspectives on Turkey 25 (Fall 2001): 103-21.
72 Phanariots are often mentioned in lists of ayan families ofthe eighteenth century, but they are
portrayed as a small elite group of families that administered the Danubian Principalities and
engaged in European-Ottoman commerce. See, Bruce McGowan, "Elites and Their Retinues,"
reasons why the current terms cannot accommodate this comparison. First,
conflicts at the time were, and the historiography of the period has been
preoccupied with the institutional, legal, and military realms of governance,
particularly regarding the early nineteenth century.73 This was the period of
the Nizam-t Cedid, or New Order reforms under Sultan Selim III. One major
goal of these reforms was to recoup power that had been taken by ayan
(or provincial notables) over the course ofthe eighteenth century.74
The ayan phenomenon, understandably, is the central lens through which
historians have viewed eighteenth-century Ottoman governance.75 Ayan
families began to dominate several sectors of governance in their respective
provinces. Military power, tax farming, bureaucracy, and commerce were all
combined in a patchwork of family dynasties across Ottoman lands. Taken
together this is generally seen as the period of decentralization for the
Ottoman Empire before efforts to re-centralize and modernize it, first by
Selim III (1789-1807/8), then by Mahmud (1808-1839) and his successors.
But what looks from the ayan or the central state standpoint to be decentraliza
tion (or privatization)76 appears from the Phanariot perspective to be a higher
level of integration. We can explore this question by comparing the expansion
of these two groups.
The precise recipe for each ayan family was different, but it always
included military force and most often the purchase of life-term tax-farming
rights. Beyond that, commercial connections, bureaucratic posts, and connec
tions to the Muslim hierarchy (or Christian, depending on the demography
of the province) were handy. As the official Ottoman infantry and cavalry
eroded in the eighteenth century, ayan became crucial providers of military
manpower for the central state in domestic and cross-border conflicts. As
one ayan or their variant, a derebey, rebelled against the Ottoman center,
an alliance of other ayan would battle the rebels with troops raised from
in Halil Inalcik with Donald Quataert et al., eds., An Economic and Social History ofthe Ottoman
Empire 1600-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Deena Sadat, "Rumeli
Ayanlari: The Eighteenth Century," Journal of Modern History 44, 3 (Sept. 1972): 346 63.
73 See Virginia Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1995), for an exception to this.
74 See works by Yuzo Nagata, such as Muhsin-zade Mehmed Pasa ve Ayanlik M?essesesi
[Muhsinzade Mehmd Pasha and the ayan institution] (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages
and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1976).
75 Hourani, "Ottoman Reform," 41-68; Bruce McGowan, "Age ofthe Ayans, 1699- 1812," in
Halil Inalcik with Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History ofthe Ottoman Empire,
1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 639-758; Deena Sadat, "Urban
Notables in the Ottoman Empire: The Ayan," Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1969; Deena
Sadat, "Rumeli Ayanlari"; Robert W. Zens, "The Ayanlik and Pasvanoglu Osman Pasha of Vidin
in the Age of Ottoman Social Change, 1791-1815," Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin,
Madison, 2004.
76 See Salzmann, Tocqueville.
their localities. This prompted frequent migration of both military and civi
lian populations, and it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between
the two.
Phanariots were related to but distinct from the cast of ayan characters that
rose to power during roughly the same period. The origin myth for both groups
is intriguingly similar. In the Phanariot case, Panagiotis Nikousios was said to
have been rewarded for his assistance to Grand Vizier Fazil Ahmed K?pr?l?
during the Ottoman siege of Crete in 1669 with the office of grand dragoman,
thereby making the first foray into the Ottoman court. One generation later
Alexander Mavrocordatos, as a reward for his service as the Ottoman delegate
(with Reis?lk?ttab Rami Mehmed Efendi) at the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1698 ?
1699, succeeded Nikousios as grand dragoman and was made minister ofthe
secrets (ex aporriton). His son Nicholas Mavrocordatos was appointed the
first Phanariot prince of Moldavia (1711) and then Wallachia (1716). With
the removal of indigenous Moldavian and Wallachian notables (boyars) from
the candidate pool for princely positions, Istanbul-based Phanariots enjoyed
eligibility to be invested with this office from Istanbul, and to travel to their
province to rule almost as they pleased. The period of Phanariot ascendancy
had begun.
As for the ayans, some, such as the Pasvantoglu family, were originally the
agents of Istanbul-based tax farmers who were called in to fight off the banditry
in the countryside, which had been caused by sekban troops demobilized in the
wake of hostilities with Austria between 1683 and 1699.77 This "began the
process of official recognition and an increase in importance of the ayan in
the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire."78 While the ayans started at the ter
ritorial margins and Phanariots at the imperial center, both were invited by
actors within the struggling Ottoman state to take on roles in Ottoman govern
ance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Both began with
individualized personal connections to powerful officials, and eventually
earned their own formal power by performing military or diplomatic-political
feats highly valued by the central state elite.
Although ayans and Phanariots began their ascent at the same time, there
were many differences between them beyond their respective entry points
into governance. First, direct and formally sanctioned access to military
force was not part of the Phanariot repertoire. They did maintain private
militias in Wallachia and Moldavia and assisted as front-line interpreters
in the many Ottoman military campaigns against the Austrians and Russians
at the turn of the century. But they were not normally military leaders and
77 Other ayans, particularly those in Arab provinces and to some extent in Bosnia, had different
origins, including in the indigenous Muslim landed elite.
8 Robert W. Zens, "The Ayanlik and Pasvanoglu Osman Pasha," 40.
therefore did not become provincial strongmen in the same way that
ayans did.79
Second, unlike Muslim ayans, Phanariots were not eligible to acquire
iltizam, life-term tax-farming systems that developed during the eighteenth
century. And yet, Phanariot voyvodas and other high officials managed to
accumulate land in the form of m?syes, and the privilege of collecting taxes
on it, in Wallachia and Moldavia, and also a monopoly on the okna, or salt
mines, in these principalities.80 This meant taking advantage of the liminal
administrative and legal status of the Danubian Principalities with respect to
Ottoman administration proper: autonomy gave them, as Christians, license
not only to administer the Principalities but also to imitate the means of
accumulating power and revenue that their Muslim counterparts enjoyed in
Ottoman lands.
A third difference was that, while Phanariots had a serious stake in the trade
and administration of several provinces, they relied on their activities in
Istanbul for their legitimacy and their continued access to provincial offices.
They were interpreters for the sultan, grand vizier, and other high officials
and were therefore integrated into the practice of foreign relations between
the Ottoman court and European states. While ayans such as Ali Paca of
Ioannina, the Karaosmanogullan of Izmir, and Osman Pasvantoglu of Vidin
did have representatives at the Ottoman court and did conduct their own diplo
macy directly with European envoys, Phanariots were conducting the sultan's
diplomacy for the sultan. Furthermore, Phanariots were a series of families that
revolved through the high offices open to them, rather than one specific family
or personage tied to a specific region, as was the case with ayans. That Phanar
iots as Christians were officially limited to second-class status limited their hor
izons in some ways (such as exclusion from formal participation in the military
arena of governance or direct access to iltizam), but it opened new possibilities
in others. They used the empire-wide Orthodox Church apparatus for commer
cial enterprise and to facilitate the flow of information (as monks and clerics
traveled regularly across the Empire and into Russian lands for alms or business
with sister monasteries, bringing with them goods and information), and the
autonomous realms of Moldavia and Wallachia could imitate Muslim
79 There were important exceptions to this. In 1800, the Hospodar of Wallachia Moruz Bey
raised troops to attack rebel ayan Osman Pasvantoglu on his northern flank, as central state loyalists
were attacking him on the southern flank. See L. Leger, "Le Boulgare sous Pasvan oglou" [M?m
oires de Sophroni], M?langes orientaux; textes et traductions pub. par les professeurs de l Ecole
sp?ciale des langues orientales vivantes ? l'occasion du sixi?me Congres international des orien
talistes r?uni ? Leyde (septembre 1883), vol. 9 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1883.), 383-429. Nicholas Mav
royenis raised an army of Christians and commanded an army of Muslims to fight the allied
Austrian and Russian invasion of the Principalities in the late 1780s. See Photeinos, History of
the Former Dacia, vol. 2, 360, passim; Shaw, Between Old and New, 32.
80 Sergiu Columbeanu, Grandes exploitations domaniales en Valachie au XVIII-e si?cle
(Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1974).
ascendants to power. The Church also facilitated connections with the Russian
Empire and its Orthodox Church.
The resolution of this Ottoman-Phanariot story comes with the 1819 Kanun
name, or Regulation, known among contemporaries as the Hanedan-i Erba 'a,
or Dynasty of Four.81 In describing the Phanariot administration ofthe 1810s
that prompted the reform measure, Photeinos condemns the expansion in offi
cial personnel:
Promotions ofthe archons and the hierarchy of offices always depends on the will ofthe
voyvoda, and whereas in old times sudden promotions and the skipping of ranks were
rare, in recent times, however, the need of the voyvoda to please the Ottomans, the
Orthodox Christians [Romaious], and the Wallachians, and the selling of offices has
caused a proliferation of titles; that is, to many people are given paye?only the titles
of offices?and these people are made happy with high appellations, because with
those they enjoy the designated number of serfs for life, the preeminence granted by
the rank of their title, and the honor and other privileges accompanying such offices.82
Even though Photeinos claims that the voyvodas were creating new offices
"to please the Ottomans," the Ottoman central state had noted the expansion
of offices as wrongful even as Photeinos' history was under publication.
With the support of Phanariot patron and court favorite Halet Efendi, an
1819 Kanunname was drawn up to "take back the reins" of Phanariot power
and limit access to the highest four offices to four specific Phanariot families,
to be known as the Hanedan-i Erba 'a: 'Those descending from the Phanariot
faction have been preferred for employment and have been close to the
esteem of the strong state for some time now. The people who have reached
the offices of imperial dragoman, dragoman of the fleet, and voyvodas of the
Twin Principalities who are at times appropriate and at other times coming
from the outside and deserving as well as undeserving of these offices has
multiplied. Their love of advancement has become a breeding ground for
them to intrigue against each other."83
To solve this problem, four families would "have a monopoly" of the four
high offices?that of the reigning Moldavian Voyvoda Kallimaki; of the
current Wallachian Voyvoda Drakozade Aleko Soutsos; of Mihal Bey's line
descending from the current Imperial Dragoman Drakozade Mihalaki
Soutsos; and the "houses of the three brothers of the deceased Alexander
Moruzis." The other families who would be excluded from eligibility?such
as Yakovaki (Argyropoulos) and the Han?erli (Hantzeris) families?would be
81 See Vassilios Sphyroeras, "Ho Kanounnames tou 1819 gia ten ekloge ton Phanarioton stis
Hegemonies kai thn Dragomania" [The kanunname of 1819 for the election of Phanariots to the
Principalities and the dragomanate], Ho Eranistes 11 (1974): 568-79; Andrei Otetea, "La deseg
regation du regime phanariote," in Symposium l'Epoque Phanariote (Thessaloniki: Institute for
Balkan Studies, 1974), 439-47.
82 Photeinos, History ofthe Former Dacia, vol. 2, 447.
83 BOA Name-i H?mayun #989.
paid a pension of sixty thousand and forty thousand kuru?, respectively, by the
four reigning families.84
One could speculate endlessly on the particular motives, machinations, and
alliances, both foreign and domestic, which led to the issuance of this regu
lation. Of immediate interest, however, is that the regulation represents the
desire to formally integrate specific Phanariots into the matrix of Ottoman gov
ernance, to transform them from an amorphous (and uncontrollable) group into
a collection of four organized dynasties, and to winnow down their numbers at
the top and regularize membership in their retinues, rules for their election, and
terms of office. And all of these just months before the outbreak ofthe Greek
rebellions that would, we know now, lead to the establishment of an indepen
dent Greek Kingdom under great-power protection, the first independent
successor-state of the Ottoman Empire.
VIII .CONCLUSION
Having considered the Phanariot ascendancy in an intra-Ottoman comparative

context, it is clear that their case echoes in various ways those of regional
ayans. But the Phanariot ascendancy also speaks to our current preoccupations
with the histories of Muslim-Christian relations. Our tendency has been to
ignore significant cases of interdependence between Muslim and Orthodox
Christian groups, such as the case of the Phanariot ascendancy in the
Ottoman Empire. This has contributed to a monolithic conceptualization not
just of religions and "civilizations" but of Eurasian empires that, lacking the
capacity and will to forcibly convert all who lived in their domains to the domi
nant state religion, had to find ways to manage, and better yet to use the con
fessional diversity they inherited in their realms.85 Here, recognizing the extent
to which Muslims of Russia and the Caucasus (and later even Central Asia)
contributed to the workings ofthe Russian Empire enhances our understanding
of Phanariots.86 A new wave of Russian history-writing has begun to explore
the many dimensions of Muslim subjects' participation in the Russian imperial
project, both voluntarily and in response to coercive practices of the Russian
state from the Petrine to Soviet eras.87
84 Ibid.
85 This is not to deny that serious efforts had been made and incentives put in place to encourage
conversion to the dominant religion in both the Ottoman and Russian cases. In the former, tax
exemption was a major incentive. In the latter, policies for compulsive conversion to Christianity
waxed and waned with different emperors. Catherine, for instance, "closed the office ofthe militant
proselytizers who had antagonized Muslims and animists in the Volga and Kama River and Urals
regions." Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 39.
86 See various selections in Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzarini, eds., Russia's Orient:
Imperial Borderlands and Peoples 1700-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
87 See, for example, Crews, For Prophet and Tsar; Charles King, The Black Sea: A History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lieven, Empire; Michael Kemper, et al., Muslim
Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries, 4 vols.
Christian Phanariots of the Ottoman Empire, while not perfect analogues of

Muslims in Russia's Volga basin and Crimea, similarly complicate our under
standings of how officially subaltern groups function in multi-confessional
empires. Both groups belonged to the major non-dominant confession in their
respective empires, and shared the dominant confession of the enemy state. In
the Russian case, religious institutions of Islam were created, regulated, and inte
grated into a Russian framework, at times in imitation of Russian perceptions of
the Ottoman millet system and the Islamic religious-administrative hierarchy.88
In the Ottoman-Phanariot case I have discussed here, Orthodox Christians, like
their Muslim counterparts in the Russian Empire, had been a constituent unit of
their respective empires since its inception. Orthodox Christian subjects of the
Ottoman Empire enjoyed the status of descent from the Ottomans' predecessors
on the same land?the Byzantine Empire (and before that the Roman Empire). In
this way, they were like Muslim subjects of the Russian Empire who enjoyed
(and later suffered from) association with Orthodox Russia's Muslim imperial
predecessors. Phanariots were penetrating key sectors of Ottoman governance
in both the imperial capital and the borderlands, often without the full cognizance
of high Ottoman officials, and certainly in the absence of deliberate policies and
principles aimed to bring them into the sphere of Ottoman governance, like those
directed at Muslim subject groups in Catherine's Russia who remained remote
from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. In the Phanariot case, all of this
was occurring just before the trajectory of imperial modernizing reforms began
in earnest with the Tanzimat reform program promulgated in 1839 and 1856.
With those reforms, the strategies for managing the multi-confessional
Ottoman Empire would shift abruptly.89
In both the Russian and Ottoman cases the participation of non-dominant
confessional groups in the work of imperial governance flies in the face of
entrenched assumptions about eternal conflict between Islam and Christianity
and the ramifications of institutionalized exclusion of the non-dominant
group, whether Muslims in an Orthodox Christian empire or Orthodox Chris
tians in an Islamic empire. Furthermore, by comparing the Ottoman-Phanariot
case with the Russian-Muslim case, we can situate Orthodox Christians of the
Ottoman Empire, not midway between an Islamic East and a Christian West,
but within the more complex (and relevant at the time) tensions and dynamics
(Berlin: Schwartz, 1996-2004); Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia:
The Islamic World of Novouzensk and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910 (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
2001).
88 Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 34-49, esp. 47-48.
89 On the Tanzimat reforms, see Roderic Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Carter Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman
Empire. For a comparative perspective, see Lieven, Empire, ch. 4.
COMMUNITIES ON THE VERGE 18 I
between the Russian and Ottoman Empires from the eighteenth century until
the nearly simultaneous demise of those empires during the First World War.
Studies connecting Ottoman governance with non-Muslim populations in
plausible and humanizing ways have only just begun.90 Logically, there should
be innumerable threads connecting the core state apparatus with non
Muslims?on the levels of people, goods, ideas, customs, and political cultures,
for instance?without the presence of an integrationist ideology or state policy.91
Phanariots were not incidental to Ottoman history?at the turn ofthe nineteenth
century they were both products and agents of Ottoman governance. They, like
their ayan counterparts, were fusing several institutions and coming up with
novel combinations of operations to further their own ambitions but also to main
tain the work of Ottoman governance. They were autonomous rulers, intermedi
aries, merchants, purveyors, and courtiers. Sultan Selim III cursed them, executed
them from time to time, and wondered to his grand vizier why these Phanariots
could not be stamped out. The answer was that in addition to damaging his
state they had become his state, just as they had been fused with the Russian
state. Sultan Mahmud IPs regime conceded that they were part of his state, and
institutionalized the participation of some and the exclusion of others.
The process of inadvertent integration underway at the century's turn was
advanced in the course of each new conflict, both within and outside the
Empire, and Phanariots became ever more relevant and useful to the project
of Ottoman imperial governance. This integration was often as an unintended
consequence of state policies, until finally, just before the outbreak ofthe Greek
Revolution, it was sanctioned by the sultan himself. Simultaneous with the Pha
nariot ascendancy, ideologies were emerging that would articulate anew both
the Islamic character of the Ottoman state and the ethno-national ambitions
of some Phanariots for an independent Orthodox Christian polity. The 1819
Regulation under Mahmud II amounted to a very different solution to the
same problem Selim III had encountered two decades earlier: whether to inte
grate Phanariots into or expunge them from Ottoman governance. By the time
the Greek Revolution broke out in 1821, Mahmud II would come to see the
wisdom in executing Phanariots, like Selim III had done. At the turn of the
nineteenth century Phanariots had ascended to become an Ottoman community
on the verge, not just of national secession but of imperial integration.92
90 On sectarian violence in nineteenth-century Lebanon, see Ussama Makdisi, Cultures of Sec

tarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000). On conversion and apostasy, see Selim Deringil, The Well
Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimacy in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
91 See Speros Vryonis, "The Byzantine Legacy and Ottoman Forms," Dumbarton Oaks Papers
23(1969-1970): 251-308.
92 See Christine Philliou, Biography of an Empire. For Phanariot ambitions in the national age,
see Paschalis Kitromilides, Neoellenikos Diaphotismos.

фанариоти

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

фанариоти

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance

Communities on the Verge: Unraveling

I.QUESTIONS OF ASCENDANCY AND DEMISE

According to the core Ottoman narrative of military and administrative modern

In the following discussion I trace this inadvertent integration in a number of

II.THE OFFICIAL STORY

20 Nicholas Soutsos, M?moires du prince Nicolas Soutzo, grand-logoth?te de Moldavie,

I I I.THE PHANARIOT ASCENDANCY THROUGH THE

IV. PERFORMING OTTOMAN GOVERNANCE

Istanbul portion of the ceremony began with a ritualized invitation ceremony to

nature of Phanariot voyvodas as both autonomous rulers and administrator

V. WAR AND PEACE IN THE LIFE OF A PHANARIOT

Historian-political scientist Paschalis Kitromilides has integrated social and

Dionysios Photeinos was born in 1769 in Patras, overlooking what

Hypsilantis had been expelled as voyvoda. The administration had been

VI.THE MILLET SYSTEM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Historians have not generally examined Phanariots and their Muslim-Ottoman

moment: Alexandras Voyvoda Soutsos and Alexandras Voyvoda Hantzeris.

54 Ban?highest ranking of the indigenous boyars.

56 Tra?an Stoianovich, "The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant," in Economies and

the mid-nineteenth century)61 and the Archon Logothetes Gregorios

production. In 1808, Iskerletzade Aleko commissioned a nasihatname,

VII . PHAN ARIOTS-AND OTHER OTTOMANS?

Having considered the Phanariot ascendancy in an intra-Ottoman comparative

Christian Phanariots of the Ottoman Empire, while not perfect analogues of

90 On sectarian violence in nineteenth-century Lebanon, see Ussama Makdisi, Cultures of Sec

You might also like