Civilisation. That collecting of humans
under a blanket of laws and cities, writing and philosophy,
infrastructure and technology. It’s what separates us from barbarism, from
a crueller tooth and claw existence. Where it began on this planet is not the subject of
this presentation. But where it was refined, is. When you consider a peninsula and archipelago at
the south-east edge of Europe, at first sight, one would think such a rocky, unyielding part of the
world would amount to nothing on a global scale. But it can be argued that this uninviting land
produced a people and culture that influenced the world beyond any other. A world without
the development of the republic or democracy, athletics or science, critical thinking, or the
subject of history itself. It could be argued that the western world in particular would be
unrecognisable today without the existence of this culture, with Western philosophy rooted
here. Modern European languages have large numbers of words derived from those first used
by these people, and its alphabet is still used widely in science, and is the ancestor of the
key alphabets in use in the world today. Having one of the longest spans of recorded history,
its people have gone from global influencers, to conquerors and then to the conquered. But
their people and language have survived more or less intact to the present day, distinct
from others and deeply proud of their past. There is perhaps no other land where the cycle
of civilisation has been traced so thoroughly. It is, in short, an incredible story. And as
this channel reaches the landmark of 100,000 subscribers, I decided to mark this occasion
by looking my personal favourite among the world’s nation states. I’m happy to tell
that story now. And that story is Greece. Greece is a country that marks the
South Eastern boundary of Europe. It is home to the Greek people, descendants
of a culture that spans almost 5,000 years of history. The word Greece comes to us via
the Latin Graecia, as the first contact the Romans made with the Greeks were the ancient
Graeci tribe that settled in southern Italy. Greeks today call their country Ellada
(Ελλάδα), but in classical times it was known as Hellas (Ἑλλάς), and this is why Greek
culture is often referred to as Hellenic. In this, the first of two videos about the
country, I will be focusing on its long history, from political, military and cultural viewpoints.
In Part 2, I will look at the structures and symbols of the modern state, the physical and
human geography of the mainland and islands, the country’s economy, and the Greek culture of today.
In order to understand not just the Greek people of today, but how their ancestors came to
influence so much of the world today, we must undertake a journey through time in
one of the longest strands of human history. There have been many looks at specific stages
of Greek history, especially those focusing on the ancient part. And while these studies are
valid, something about the whole is lost when viewed separately. Perhaps it is because
it is such a huge, daunting subject that few have attempted to address the whole span of
history of these people. But I remain undaunted, and so will attempt such a journey, breaking it
down into a series of chapters in what I will call the Eight Ages of Greece. Each period is
distinct in its situation, marking a particular turning in events, and the fate of its people,
and at times, the peoples of many other nations. Humans have existed in Greece for as much as
200,000 years, and in fact the oldest skulls of our species, homo sapiens, outside of Africa,
have been found here. Farming reached the area around 7000BC, the first in Europe, being
adjacent to the Near East where it began. But it was in the Bronze Age when civilisation
took an upward turn, with the Minoans on the island of Crete developing a sophisticated urban
culture around 2700BC, considered to be the first advanced civilisation in Europe. Palaces up to
four stories were built, such as at Knossos, supposed location of King Minos, the labyrinth and
the half-man half-bull Minotaur of Greek legend. They were followed by the Mycenaean
civilisation on the mainland around 1600BC. Their writing system, called Linear B, is
the first evidence of the emergence of the Greek language, and the oldest European written
language. The Mycenaean’s interactions with the non-Greek civilisations of Anatolia across the
Aegean sea may have been the inspiration for later stories concerning the siege of Troy.
Around 1500BC the island of Thera, today’s Santorini, was blown into pieces in one of the
largest volcanic eruptions in human history. At least 60 cubic kilometres of rock was
ejected, covering to some degree most of the Eastern Mediterranean, and burying the
ancient city of Akrotiri on the island itself. This burial preserved complete houses, wall
paintings and other artefacts which were unearthed only in modern times, and so is
often referred to as the “Greek Pompeii”. Some have suggested that myths concerning
the eruption may have been the inspiration for the story of Atlantis, first mentioned by the
Greek philosopher Plato a thousand years later. Between 1250 and 1180BC a catastrophic series
of events that is still not well understood, resulted in the collapse of
the Mycenaean civilisation, along with all other civilisations of the Eastern
Mediterranean except Egypt. The four centuries that followed the Late Bronze Age Collapse
were a dark age in which little is known, with writing ending and the cities being abandoned
or destroyed. But out of this dark age would emerge something more sophisticated, and much
more far reaching in its impact upon the world. Around 800BC an unknown Greek took the
Phoenician alphabet and adjusted it to better suit the sounds of the Greek
language. This alphabet was the first ever to have specific letters for not
just consonant sounds but vowels also. It spread rapidly into use across the Greek world
and beyond, becoming the ancestor of the Latin script that today dominates the world outside of
Asia, as well as the Cyrillic scripts of Russian and other Slavic languages. Local variants
existed until 402BC when it was formalised. That script is still in use today throughout
Greece and the rest of the world in academia. With the resumption of writing, we are able once
again to trace the journey of the Greek people, and it was in the Archaic Age that
the formation of the ancient Greek civilisation that we know so well occurred.
Sudden population growth across Mediterranean, possibly related to a shift to cooler and wetter
weather at that time that allowed for more bountiful harvests, led to rapid urbanisation
in 8th century BC in the form of the “polis”, the Greek word for city. While the polis
of Athens moved toward a democratisation of power among its citizens, and indeed the demes or
suburbs of that city gave us the word democracy, the norm was for such cities to come
under the rule of a single man, or tyrant. The sudden rise in population also led to pressure
to seek land outside of Greece, and in this period significant colonisation of the Mediterranean
occurred, especially in Sicily and Southern Italy, while cities as far as modern day Georgia in the
Black Sea, and the South of France were founded. And with that system of writing, the deeply
rich tradition of Greek literature was born. Most famous and influential of these are
the earliest – the epic poems of Homer. Homer, who may or may not have been
one person, wrote the Iliad and Odyssey sometime during the 8th Century BC. These
poems, the earliest stories in European culture, relate to events surrounding and after the siege
of Troy by the Greeks, and have through the ages been celebrated by countless European writers as
the most important works of literature in history. But Homer was accompanied by many other poets
during the Archaic age, as the sophistication of storytelling, such as the development of the
tragedy, in both poetry and theatre increased. Many of these stories concerned the mythology of
heroes, such as Herakles and their manipulation by an often capricious pantheon of gods. This
pantheon is known as the Olympians, since Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite, Diana and Ares among
others supposedly lived atop Mount Olympus. They existed in mythology at
least as early as the Bronze Age, and are today perhaps the most widely known
of all mythologies concerning deities, thanks to the colourful way in which such
a large number of stories are formed, and indeed the adoption or fusion of these gods with
their own by the Romans as we shall later see. These myths went on to immortality in the form of
constellations in the night sky, many of which are still in use today, such as Perseus and Andromeda,
Hercules and Orion. And although the stars of such constellations later took on mostly Arabic names,
the sequential designations of each star within each constellation use the Greek alphabet, with
the name of the closest star system to our sun, Alpha Centauri, being an entirely Greek latter-day
construction. And on the subject of the night sky, as everyone learns from childhood, the names
of almost every planet and moon in the solar system are derived from the gods, goddesses
and other characters of this rich mythology. It was claimed that one of these deities,
Apollo, would utter words of prophecy through the vessel of a high priestess, known
as Pythia, who resided at the shrine of Delphi. While there were other seers or oracles within
the Greek world, the oracle of Delphi became the most well respected and known throughout the
ancient world, owing to the apparent accuracy of her often-cryptic responses. The oracle was
consulted by rulers as well as commoners, and exerted considerable political influence, as many
key decisions in Greek history were made after she was consulted, and so it is argued that she was
the most important woman of the ancient world. Established some time before the 8th century BC,
she was consulted for over 1,200 years with the last recorded response given to the last pagan
emperor of Rome, Julian the Apostate, in 362AD. The start of the Archaic age is officially
marked by the hosting of the first athletic games of Olympia, in 776BC. Held every four years,
in celebration of Zeus at his temple in that city, the Olympic games continued to be held in
this way for another twelve hundred years, and were the inspiration behind the
modern games that we all know today. Sculpture of the human form developed
in this time, but would not reach its apex until the following age. Pottery, on the
other hand, became remarkably sophisticated, and being so durable, such large quantities have
survived that they give us the most detailed glimpse into the lives of these ancient
Greeks, more so than any written sources. Coinage was invented in the Greek kingdom
of Lydia in Anatolia around 650BC. While previously precious metal bullion
had been used in trade, the development of standardised coinage, with a stamp to mark its
authenticity of confirmed purity and weight, was an innovation and its use quickly spread among
the Greek world, and beyond, as history shows. Military innovation at this time
saw the development of the Hoplite, a well-armoured spearman fighting in
well ordered, tightly formed ranks, known as a phalanx, wherein their shields
would overlap, and where an opposing enemy would find only a bristling set of spikes as a
welcome. The hoplite, developed over centuries of individual Greek cities fighting each other,
would come to the fore in the following age, when Greece had to face down its greatest
threat, this time from the outside. It was at ancient Greek civilisation’s
cultural apex that the whole Greek world faced it greatest threat, in this, the Classical
Age. The Empire of Persia had grown dramatically over the 6th and 5th Centuries BC to become
the largest empire the world had yet known. It was at least twenty times the size of the Greek
world in terms of population and area, extending from present day Afghanistan to the shores of the
Aegean. And it was at this latter boundary that the troubles between the two cultures began, as
the Greeks of Ionia, what is modern day western Turkey, resisted the rule of the Persians
and rebelled. They were ultimately defeated, but the Persian king Darius saw that the only way
to deal with the Greek threat was to take over the whole Greek world. In a series of invasions over
the next half-century, he and his successor Xerxes engaged the allied Greek city states in a series
of land and sea battles that became legendary. The battle of Marathon, in which supposedly
a single soldier ran the 26 miles from the battlefield to Athens to inform the city of
victory. The battle of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartans, at a narrow pass, held back the
entire Persian host of a hundred thousand or more for three days before being wiped out. The
battle of Salamis that routed the Persian navy. The battle of Plataea, where the Greeks finally
defeated the Persians in the open field. Even though the Persians at one time occupied most
of Greece, including Athens, they were unable to hold their gains and by 450BC, having lost much
of the coast of the Aegean, the Persians sought peace. Greek culture had survived, despite
the odds of being overwhelmingly outnumbered. There was an uneasy truce for the next 120
years, and one which would end explosively, changing the ancient world forever.
These events became the subject of… the form of this presentation, namely the subject of
history itself. Prior to this, history was mixed up with mythology, such as Homer’s telling
of the Greek wars with Troy, which may or may not have been true, and if they were, based
upon generations of oral tradition handed down. Herodotus, born only a few years after the
Greek-Persian wars, documented them after first systematically investigating the actual events,
through interviews of those that were there, or first-hand written accounts. This method
would become the model of history as we know it through to the present day. The Roman orator
Cicero called Herodotus “The Father of History”. Culturally, the independent city states
that made up the Greek world were at their richest. Sculpture, that had been in gradual
development throughout the Archaic age, undertook a revolution at the time of the Persian
wars, with the particular focus on the realistic depiction of the human form that was the most
advanced anywhere in the world at that time, becoming the model for Roman and Greek sculptures
over the next 800 years, and revived again in the 1500s during the Italian Renaissance and
actively copied from then until the present day. Greek philosophy equally undertook
a revolution at this time, and it is perhaps philosophy that makes Ancient Greece
stand out from its peers more than any other, as most cultures at that time relied upon
religion for answers to the age-old question of human existence, and had no subject that
we would today recognise as philosophy, that is questioning and reason associated with
our existence and the natural order of things. The Athenian philosopher Socrates used the
dialogue method for challenging thinking that was so revolutionary, he is regarded by
many as the founder of Western philosophy. His pupil, Plato continued his tradition.
Plato’s most famous work, Republic, explored the area of justice and sought to find the
ideal way to exist within a governed community, or literally, a utopia, and has influenced
political science more than any other work. His pupil Aristotle sought to unify all strands of
knowledge, from the existing philosophers’ works, logic, science and the arts. He could be thought
of as the father of knowledge itself. Aristotle’s most notable pupil was not a philosopher at all,
but the son of a king - Alexander of Macedon, and his world-changing story
will be told in the next chapter. Architecture was also swept up in this golden
age of Greek culture. The temples atop the acropolis of Athens were destroyed during
the Persian invasion, and to replace them, in 447BC, the city’s leader, Pericles undertook an
historic rebuilding of this sacred site, with the highlight being the Parthenon, dedicated to the
city’s goddess Athena, a structure considered to be of such perfect form and geometry that it
still stands today as one of the most famous and recognisable buildings in the world. The Greek
system of columns and beams went on to be adopted by the Romans, and, after the Renaissance, became
the standard for Neo-Classical architecture used in thousands of civic buildings across Europe and
North America up to the present day. The strive to architectural perfection extended from the
religious to that of public entertainment, with the erection of countless amphitheatres across the
Greek world as the site of drama, which the Greeks had also taken to a form of sophistication
yet to be seen anywhere in the world. The tradition of the Greeks organising themselves
into self-governing communities, or the polis, again marked them out as unique within the
civilisations of the ancient world. But lacking a central authority led to its own problem,
that of war between such states for ascendancy. Such matters came to a head in 431BC with start
of the Peloponnesian War as Sparta challenged the hitherto dominant Athens. Sparta and Athens
had been the two leading powers within Greece for centuries, and were natural opponents. Athens
had democracy and its primary strategic focus was on maritime trade and guaranteeing it
with a large navy. Sparta was a society hyper-focused on its land army, with all male
Spartan citizens being highly trained soldiers, made possible by the enslavement of most
of the remaining people within its borders. The war between Athens and Sparta, and their
allies, dragged on for the next three decades, leading to the ultimate defeat of Athens
and the end of Athenian democracy. But the almost single-minded warrior culture of
Sparta was an ill-fit for the rest of Greece, and Sparta’s dominance of the Greek world was short
lived, with Athens recovering some of its earlier power, while the city of Thebes gained much in the
following decades. When Thebes asked Philip, the king of Macedon in the far north, for help in one
of its wars, this proved to be a turning point. Prior to this, Macedonia had not been much
involved in the affairs of the squabbling city states to the south, but seeing their weakness
after so many decades of constant infighting, seized the opportunity, defeating a coalition
of them all at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338BC, and uniting Greece for the first time in a
confederation under a single overarching ruler. The polis was gone. But what came in its
place, few could have ever predicted. Macedonia, at the northern fringe of the Greek
world, was considered semi-barbaric by the more “civilised” Greeks in the city states to
the south. It had been ruled by a dynastic family for centuries, and during such time had
remained roughly the same size. But with the accession of Phillip II in 359BC, this changed
dramatically. He radically reformed the army, and innovated with the new sarissa pikes that were
far longer than the traditional hoplite spears used in the Greek phalanx. They were so long and
heavy that they had to be wielded with both hands, so reducing the traditional hoplite shield to
a piece of armour hung around the neck. The Macedonian phalanx was impenetrable from the
front, as the enemy had to somehow fight through multiple bristling ranks of spears. However, they
were vulnerable from the sides and back, and so required high discipline in order to lift spears,
turn and lower again to re-engage. The second key innovation came in the development of an elite
cavalry, known as the Companions, regarded as the first shock cavalry in European military
history. This cavalry and infantry combined on the battlefield would prove unbeatable in the next one
and a half centuries, and was the instrument used to fashion the will of Phillip to conquer Greece,
and then his son, Alexander, to conquer an empire. With Greece now in Phillip’s hands, he had planned
to use the united armies of the former city states in his intended invasion of the Persian Empire.
However, just two years after the decisive battle of Chaeronea, he was murdered by one of his
bodyguards in 336BC. Alexander assumed the throne and sharing the will of his father, began the
invasion just two years later, under the pretext of avenging the desecration of the temples atop
the Athenian acropolis a century and a half early. Initially meeting limited resistance, Alexander’s
army marched through Anatolia liberating the ethnically Greek cities therein, and only first
engaging the Persian king Darius III in a large battle at Issus, three years into the campaign
in 333BC. Despite being outnumbered 2:1, the Greeks prevailed, Darius fled, and the campaign
continued. A long siege at Tyre, in today’s Lebanon, was followed by the invasion of Persian
Egypt, where he was welcomed as a liberator and proclaimed Pharoah, the first in a long line of
Macedonian Pharoahs that ended with Cleopatra, yes, that Cleopatra, three centuries later. The
city of Alexandria was founded by him, the first of many new cities where Greeks were encouraged
to settle and spread Greek culture far and wide. Meanwhile Darius had been
amassing an enormous army, waiting for Alexander to cross the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers in modern day Iraq, where he could use the large plain for his
superiority of numbers to full advantage. The chosen site, Gaugamela, should, by any
accounts have been an overwhelming proposition for the Greeks. Outnumbered by at least 2:1 and
possibly a lot more, with no features of the terrain to even out the odds, Alexander understood
this would be his greatest test. And yet, showing his unrivalled force of will backed up by the
best military machine of its day, he triumphed. The Battle of Gaugamela, of 331BC ranks as
one of the largest of the ancient world, and its consequences among the most far reaching.
Although Darius fled the battlefield, he was eventually betrayed by his own bodyguards, left
to die at the side of the road, and with him ended the centuries long Achaemenid Empire that had,
up until that time been the largest in the world. Alexander marched triumphally into Babylon,
which he made the new imperial capital. He apparently showed great tolerance toward his
new subjects, incorporated many of the existing Persian bureaucrats into his new administration.
But on the darker side burned the old capital of Persepolis to the ground, supposedly as revenge
for the destruction of the Athenian acropolis. The campaign continued for another seven years,
with Alexander’s armies defeating remnants of the Persian army, and founding new cities as far as
Central Asia. Seeking to find the fabled end of the world ocean, he then invaded India, but it was
a step too far for his generals and men, who had not been home in a decade. Facing a mutiny,
Alexander agreed to return to centre of the new empire, but in the harsh deserts of Southern
Iran lost half his army to thirst and starvation. That march home was his greatest blunder.
Within a year of the campaign being over, however, Alexander was dead, aged just 31,
and having conquered most of the known world. He is unquestionably one of the greatest military
commanders in history, if not the greatest. He never lost a battle, despite being frequently
outnumbered. The astonishing Macedonian achievement, of defeating an empire more than
20 times its size, is as much due to his father, Philip, as it is to Alexander himself. It is rare
indeed in history when we find two successive generations of kings at the very top of their
game. But beyond Alexander’s military prowess, he appeared to genuinely seek a greater unity
in the world, giving positions of authority to Persians within the army and government, marrying
the easterner Roxane, and supposedly having plans to mix the peoples of Europe and Asia
together with encouraged migrations each way. Part of this more creative side of Alexander
may have been a result of his tutelage by Aristotle. But his darker side, such as
the gratuitous burning of Persepolis, reminds us that the Macedonians were not
as civilised as we might hope to believe. The cause of his death has been the subject of
intense speculation in the ensuing 2,300 years, with theories being that he unwittingly mixed
septic water with his wine, others that he was poisoned. The latter theory has weight in that
assassination was a recurring theme among the Macedonians, and there is a motivation for one
or more of his generals to have wanted him dead. Alexander had been planning yet more
conquests, first that of Arabia to the south, and then to confront the “upstart”
Romans far to the west. For some, they had had enough fighting for one lifetime.
The empire was divided among four of his generals, in what would become known as the Successor
Kingdoms. For the next half-century they fought each other over the spoils of land
that Alexander had conquered. In the east, much of the heart of the Persian Empire was lost
to the new Parthian Empire, although the Greek Bactrian kingdom in today’s Afghanistan
survived for another two hundred years. Despite his short reign, Alexander’s legacy
was enormous. Greek culture, once confined to a relatively small area around the Aegean, and
Southern Italy, was now released upon the Near and Middle East, and would have a profound effect
on the culture of Egypt, Palestine and Anatolia in particular for the next thousand years, as Greek
became the common language of these regions. The New Testament of the Bible was first
written in Greek, for example. Numerous scientific advances using the Greek philosophical
method were made, and all known written works were assembled in the Great Library of Alexandria,
within Ptolemaic Egypt, the most long lasting of the successor kingdoms that was founded by
one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy. And it was at this time, with the Greeks now travelling
to such far-flung lands, that the ancient travel guide of sights to be seen was compiled. The
top seven of these “sights” "theamata" (θεάματα) "thaumata" θαύματα, "wonders" became what we know
today as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Only the most ancient of these, the Great Pyramid
of Giza, however, has survived to the present day. Had Alexander lived, world history would
have undoubtedly taken a very different turn, because with Alexander’s death died
his plans for the invasion of Rome. And that political force, not
checked, would eventually come to dominate the entire Greek world,
and indeed the entire Mediterranean. The Hellenistic Age is considered by historians
to extend until the Battle of Actium in western Greece in 31BC, in which the last Macedonian
Pharoah, Cleopatra VII was defeated by Octavian - the future Roman Emperor Augustus. But events
within Greece proper regarding the expanding Romans had occurred a century earlier, and the
extensive Greek cities in Southern Italy and Sicily had been defeated by the Romans a century
before even that. Since this presentation is about Greece itself, I have begun this new, Roman,
Age of Greece a century earlier than Actium. The motivations of the Roman Republic in the last
few centuries BC are complex and beyond the scope of this presentation, but will be addressed in
a future video concerning Italy. To be brief, Roman expansion across the Mediterranean seemed
inevitable from about 250BC onwards, and so to explain the complex details of Roman involvement
within Greece are simply details in the greater picture. In a series of wars with Macedonia that
began in 200BC, the showdown to see which military system was superior, the Roman legions or
the Macedonian phalanx, would be decided. Despite seeming invulnerable throughout the
wars of Alexander in Persia, the phalanx proved to be no match to the well-armoured,
flexible and highly mobile Roman legions, with Macedonia suffering a crushing defeat against
Rome at the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197BC. Macedonia was finally defeated in 148BC, and the
central and southern part of Greece, at that time known as the Achaean League was defeated by Rome
just two years later at the Battle of Corinth, and so by 146BC Greek independence was lost and
became the property of the Roman state. Corinth itself was sacked, and many thousands of Greeks
taken back to Rome as slaves. In the rebellion of 88BC, the Greek peninsula was devastated by
the Roman dictator Sulla, and further damaged in the Roman Civil Wars later that century.
So in this regard the fate of Greece was a fairly typical, tragic one for a newly conquered
Roman province. However, what made Greece unique in its past also made it unique among Rome’s
acquisitions, for many Romans saw that in so many ways Greek civilisation was superior to theirs,
particularly in the arts and in philosophy. Many Roman nobles would soon be educated by Greek
tutor slaves, and to speak Greek was a sign of prestige and good education. The Greek and Roman
pantheon was very similar, hinting at a distant common ancestor of the two peoples. Many Greek
gods were matched with Roman, such as Zeus to Jupiter or Ares to Mars. So in many ways, Greece
influenced her conqueror greatly, much in the way that Persia influenced her Arabian conquerors
seven centuries later. In the words of the Roman poet Horace “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit”
("Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror") After the initial century of devastation, and
the final spasm of the civil wars that led to the ending of the Roman Republic, and the beginning
of its empire in Greek waters at Actium in 31BC, the Greek peninsula and islands recovered
and enjoyed four centuries of peace, the longest in their history, under
the Pax Romana. Greek, and not Latin, continued to be the lingua franca in the Eastern
Mediterranean, and some philhellene Emperors such as Hadrian invested considerable sums in restoring
public buildings and places within Greek cities. Greece played an instrumental role in the spread
of Christianity in the first few centuries AD, with one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, St Paul,
in particular spending many years preaching here, and the area was a key centre of growth for
the new religion. With the accession of the Roman Emperor Constantine, and his conversion to
Christianity in the early 4th Century AD, he moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium,
renaming it Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. Constantine saw Rome as an unsuitable location for
the changing priorities of the empire. Byzantium, being at the centre of both sea and
land routes between Europe and Asia, as well as being much more defensible with
its situation at the end of a promontory into the Bosphorus straight, seemed ideal.
A century later, Constantine’s decision proved right. The Empire, despite still being considered
as a single political entity, went through a series of crises in the 3rd and 4th Centuries
AD, and in an attempt to solve these issues, was now administered from two separate courts,
with the western half governed from Rome, and later Ravenna, while the eastern
half was governed from Constantinople. At the end of the 4th Century, the large tribe
of Visigoths, under pressure to flee the Huns emerging from deep within Asia, were given refuge
by the emperor within the bounds of the empire just south of the Danube in today’s Bulgaria.
Due to a combination of the Roman officials being overwhelmed with this refugee crisis,
as well as possible mistreatment by them, the Goths rebelled, and in 378AD an army led
by the emperor went to deal with the threat. Due to poor leadership, however, the Romans
were crushed, and the Battle of Adrianople, one of the worst defeats in the history of Rome,
severely weakened the empire. The Visigoths went on to pillage much of peninsular Greece,
before turning their attentions to Italy. In 410AD, they sacked Rome, the first time in
800 years that the city had been breached. In the following decades, the Eastern half recovered, but
the Western half disintegrated. Rome had fallen and yet “Rome” in the guise of Constantinople,
would continue, for another thousand years. With the end of the Western Roman empire, we now
enter a new, quite different age in the story of Greece. Cut off from the west, the Eastern Roman
empire turned inward, focused on developing its new Christian order, and then later spreading
that message to the Slavic peoples to the north. The east also commanded its attention, protecting
the Greek world once begun by Alexander two ages before, from the threats of Persia and later
Arabia and the Turks. It is at this point that we see the end of any final influence upon Western
civilisation, as Greece developed the beginnings of the culture that we see today. This separation
was cemented in the Great Schism of the Christian church in the 11th Century, with the west
become Catholic, and the east becoming Orthodox. For the next thousand years, despite various
temporary invasions, Greece continued to thrive culturally and economically, and
with recent evidence indicating that it was one of the most commercially active
centres in the Eastern Mediterranean. Byzantine Art, centred around the Christian
story, in particular, became notable for its frescos and mosaics, and which more than anything
mark this period in the eye of the beholder today. It is somewhat of a paradox that, for the
next one thousand years, the imperial court at Constantinople continued to refer to themselves
as Roman. Greek became the official language of the Empire in the 7th Century, and so the empire
was Greek in all but name. It is because of this paradox that today we refer to this entity as
the Byzantine Empire, after the original name of its capital, and not the Roman empire, but
until its fall in 1460AD, it was in no doubt the continuation of the same political entity
founded on the River Tiber 2,200 years earlier. Such a lineage is marked by one of the key symbols
of the empire. Where once an eagle represented the legions of Rome, following the split of the
empire in the 4th Century AD, two eagles came to prominence in state symbology, representing
the western and eastern halves of the empire. In the empire holding onto this symbol so
long after the fall of its western half, it perhaps still dreamed of regaining that
lost part of itself, and indeed under the Emperor Justinian in the 6th Century
AD, an attempt was made to regain Italy, which it held for a time, before losing it once
again. The double headed eagle is still with us today with many Eastern European countries
including it on their flags or coats of arms, due to the empire’s influence in the form of
Christian Orthodox missionaries sent north. The history of this stage of the Roman Empire is
long and complex, involving half a continent. But since this presentation is about Greece, such
history is beyond its scope, and the portions that pertain to these other regions, such as
Italy, Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, will be addressed in future videos. In general, however,
the empire went through a series of crises, with a gradual reduction in land area, in the face
of, particularly, invasions from Arabia and the Ottoman Turks. But perhaps its most tragic setback
came from powers that claimed to be friendly. A series of Crusades to “liberate” Jerusalem
from Islam had been going on since the late 11th Century, but in the Fourth Crusade at the
turn of the 13th Century, a series of events led to these Christian armies, whose role
was to fight the Muslims in the Holy Land, sacking Constantinople, killing thousands
of their fellow Christian civilians and returning to Venice, which was their prime
sponsor and creditor, with uncounted riches. The emperor was overthrown, and in his
place a new “Latin Empire” was created. The act was condemned by many, including the
Pope, at the time, and caused severe damage to Catholic-Orthodox relations for centuries to come.
If there was one consolation from these events it was that many of the artefacts and manuscripts
taken back to Italy included those from the earlier Roman empire and by extension the
classical age of Greece. The continuation of this empire had kept preserved records and other
physical memories that had been lost to the West. And with their capture and study back in
Italy, they served as the seeds of the Renaissance of classical times that sprouted
from that country in the following centuries. Although the Byzantines were able to
recover their capital several decades later, the wounds to the empire were deep, and it
was never able to recover its former strength. So weakened, it was unable to resist the advance
of the Ottoman Turks, who had moved into Anatolia from Central Asia as early as the 11th Century,
and who over the next four centuries advanced slowly but methodically until, on 29 May
1453, Constantinople fell after a short siege. The event marked the end of the middle ages, the
end of eight centuries of effective Greek rule, the last vestiges of the Roman Empire expiring,
and the final reversal of that great age of Greek expansion that had exploded with Alexander
the Great, consolidated for centuries after as the Eastern Mediterranean became the greater
Greek-speaking world. For Europe as a whole, the fall of Constantinople meant centuries of
worry and conflict as the Muslim Turks carved their way into Christian Europe. For the Greeks
themselves, however, in their civilisation of five millennia, the four centuries that would
follow would perhaps mark the lowest ebb. With the capture of Constantinople, the Byzantine
Empire was now fundamentally broken, and the entire Greek peninsula fell to the Ottomans
within a few short years, although it would be another two centuries before islands such as
Crete fell to the Turks, while the islands to the West of the mainland escaped this fate, belonging
to Venice throughout the succeeding centuries. Many Greeks escaped this fate, some having moved
to Italy during the period of the Latin Empire, others fleeing after the occupation had
begun and seeing the dismal fate that awaited them if they stayed. The former Byzantine
land-owning aristocracy were all but wiped out, with administration of the land officially under
the control of the supreme leader of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan. He would parcel out the land
to soldiers and bureaucrats who had a lease on it during their lifetime, but which reverted back
to the Sultan on their death. The Greeks peasants working the land technically had ownership
of it, that was passed down the generations, but they were under the direction of the appointed
Turk overseeing it. It was in essence feudal. The economic decline after the conquest led many
Greeks to leave the cities and live in the countryside to revert to subsistence farming,
and in general there was decline in population. Many escaped into the mountains
where they could be free of the Ottoman system, albeit under the primitive
conditions that the mountains could offer. The system of millets, an Ottoman term for
giving non-Muslim subject peoples autonomy over their own communities, supposedly existed
but in practice this was not often followed, due to corruption of the local Turk governors.
The Orthodox Church was free to practice, and in fact, gained control over all non-Greek Christians
in the empire. Conversion to Islam was encouraged as Christians were taxed through the Islamic law
of jizya, a practice used throughout the Middle East by Muslim rulers for centuries. Greeks had
to keep a receipt of their payment of the tax at all times, or be subject to imprisonment,
forced conversion or on occasion, death. But perhaps the most harrowing aspect of life
under Ottoman rule was the “tribute of children”. Up to one in five of all young boys could be
conscripted into the Janissaries, the elite Ottoman infantry corps, while young girls
could be taken to serve in the Sultan’s harem, either as servants, or worse, one of
the hundreds of concubines of the ruler. One positive development that came out of
the occupation was that the Greeks were given control over all merchant shipping
within the empire, and is the background to today’s importance of Greek merchant
shipping, which we’ll look at in Part 2. In all of this, it can seem like the connection
to the past glory of the Classic Age had all but gone. And yet, the endurance of so many of those
structures of that time was considerable. The most famous of these, the Parthenon, had been
more or less intact for over two millennia, until a fateful moment in 1687. During a war
with the Venetians, the Turks used the former temple as a magazine to store their gunpowder. A
mortar round from the Venetians hit the magazine, causing the entire mass to explode, shattering
much of the structure of the building into ruins. These indignities and deprivations could not
continue indefinitely. And unsurprisingly, a resistance movement had begun
as soon as the occupation started. But it wasn’t until the early 19th century that
real hope emerged. Sentiment within Europe, particularly among the British, French
and Americans, was heavily pro-Greek, as, since the Age of Enlightenment, knowledge
and admiration of Ancient Greece was strong. Meanwhile Russia, facing the Ottomans as an enemy
in the Black Sea and Caucasus for more than a century, saw Greek Independence as a way to weaken
the Empire. And so with the help of these powers, and wealthy Greek ex-pats within Britain
and the United States, uprisings within the Greek peninsula were financed, and carried out in
1821. The backlash from the Ottomans was severe, with populations massacred, but this only made
the resolve of other countries more determined. Britain, France and Russia declared war, defeating
the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827. Greek rebel forces then were able to
advance on land. By 1832, the southern part of Greece was liberated and with recognition by the
Western Powers, the modern Greek state was born. In the century following independence, Greece underwent a rapid modernisation of its
infrastructure and industrialised to some degree. Culturally, the government attempted policies that
could be seen as De-Byzantinism or De-Ottomanism, that is, an attempt at the cultural restoration of
Ancient Greece in precedence over what came after. Western powers favoured this policy, and
encouraged the government to move the capital from Nafplio to Athens, once the shining beacon of
ancient Greek culture and democracy, to symbolise this policy. Prior to this, Athens had sunk in
significance and population to only a small town. Politically, Greece did not settle, oscillating
between despotism and democracy, monarchs, republics and military dictators until very
recently. Many Greeks left this difficult domestic situation to begin new lives
abroad, especially to the United States, other European countries and Australia.
It took another eighty years for Greece to gain territory similar to its geographic profile of
ancient times and the borders that it has today, with the largest chunk coming in the Balkan
Wars of 1913. After a political split within the country about joining the much larger First World
War, Greece finally joined the allies in 1917, persuaded by promises from the allies for land in
Eastern Thrace and Anatolia, which had significant Greek populations, and which many Greek
politicians and nationalists saw as rightfully restoring lands that had been Greek for thousands
of years until the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. After the defeat and dissolution of the
defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of the war, Greece was awarded such territories as part of
the Treaty of Sevres. When the Greek army landed in Smyrna, today’s Izmir, in 1919, they sought
to occupy such lands as promised. Encouraged by the little resistance encountered, they pressed
further into Anatolia. This military advance, among other factors, triggered an overthrow
of the Turkish government that had signed the earlier treaty that had humiliated the Turks,
and ushered in their new nationalist president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He rallied Turkish resolve,
and military power, and pushed the Greek army back to the Aegean. The resultant Treaty of Lausanne in
1923 led to a loss of the gains Greece had made in 1920, and tragically, a mass population exchange,
in which Turks within Greece were forcibly removed to Turkey, and several million Greeks in
Anatolia were removed to the west of the Aegean. This brought to a close the 2,700 year
Greek presence in Anatolia that had existed since the Archaic period. Frosty relations have
continued between Turkey and Greece to this day. At the beginning of World War II, an invasion
by Italy in 1940 was repelled by Greek forces. But a subsequent invasion by German forces
shortly after was successful and led to a brutal occupation. A strong and persistent
resistance movement operated throughout this time, despite the threat and carrying out of severe
reprisals. Some 70,000 Greeks were executed and the razing of hundreds of towns and
villages left more than a million homeless. The jubilation at the liberation of the country
at the end of the war was short lived as a new civil war erupted between government forces
and communists that finally ended in 1949. Political polarisation of the left and
right continued for decades afterwards. Economic growth in the post war years was
strong, however, despite this political strife. The last major swing in the political turmoil of
the modern Greek state occurred in 1967 when the country was taken over in a coup d’etat by
a military junta, known historically as the Regime of the Colonels. Opposition parties
were banned. Arbitrary imprisonment and torture were commonplace. The junta collapsed
in 1974, however and democratic ruled restored. Greece joined the EEC (later
European Union) in 1982. The country joined the Euro currency in
2001, a move that seven years later would exacerbate a severe contraction of the economy
following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Because the country’s economy was tied to the
Euro, it was unable to devalue its currency as a way of dealing with the situation, as
it would have done had it kept the drachma. Faced with an inability to pay its foreign debt,
under pressure from government bondholders, many of which were in Germany, the Greek government
introduced severe austerity measures that led to mass unemployment and civil unrest. This latest
crisis, sadly, can be seen as another cycle in the continuing up-and-down fortunes of the modern
independent Greek state. In spite of this, however, Greeks today enjoy the highest living
standards they’ve had in many centuries. Over five millennia, Greece has risen and
fallen and risen once more, time and again, from the Bronze Age heroics, to the collapse of
the dark age that followed, resurging again in the Archaic Age to unbeaten glory in its
Golden age, the Classical Age of Greece. With its rich culture firmly established, it then
exported this in the explosion of the wars of Alexander, spreading the Greek world throughout
the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. The military conquest by Rome in turn led, in a way,
to the Greek cultural conquest of its host that further exported an echo of this culture across
Western Europe through its empire. The conquered nation went onto survive Rome for more than a
thousand years under the Byzantines, who through missionary work then influenced much of Eastern
Europe. Once again the Greeks fell into a new dark age under Ottoman rule, once again they resurged
under independence as the modern Greek state. Few cultures have persisted as long as
the Greeks have, and very few have been able to paint this picture of the cycle
of human civilisation quite so vividly. It is a remarkable story, and, undoubtedly,
a story set to continue long into the future. Coming up in Part 2, the Geography of Greece –
the mainland and islands, sun-kissed beaches, bustling cities, olive groves and forested
mountains, and that special Mediterranean climate. The modern Greek economy, of shipping tourism
and farming, and a look at Greek culture today in the form of music, food… and big fat weddings.
Please like and share this video if you enjoyed it or found it useful, and please let me know
your thoughts in the comments, especially if you’re from this country, and if I missed out
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again for watching, and I’ll see you in Part 2.