Revolt of the Greeks

Revolt of the Greeks
One of the organizations the Ottoman Empire was Hitaria which was form in 1814 by three Greek Patriots in Odessa. This was political organization with the object of revival of ancient Greek Empire.

Disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was necessary to achieve their object. Hitaria accordingly prepared destructive plans against Ottoman Empire. As a result of the French Revolution, along with other regions patriot feeling developed in Greece also.

The revolt broke out in 1821. From political point of view, it was a national revolt. From economic point of view it was a revolt of the peasants, against the feudal land lords.

The revolt broke out in Morea and soon spread out to the whole of the Empire. The feudal land lords most of whom were Greeks were killed by the peasants.

The first confrontation between the Ottoman forces and the Greek peasants took place in the neighborhood of the Capital of Morea, in which the Ottoman army was defeated.

The capital city and adjoining territory was thus occupied by the rebels and the Muslims were ruthlessly murdered. The Greeks living in Istanbul and other cities of the Empire like Izmir and Salonika were killed in retaliation. The Greek set up a national government in liberated parts of Morea.
Revolt of the Greeks

Reason to Resist In Europe (1550 – 1700)

Reason to Resist In Europe (1550 – 1700)
Europeans lived more precariously in the seventeenth century than in any period since the Black Death.

One benchmark of the crisis was population decline. In Mediterranean, Spanish population fell from 8.5 to 7 million and Italian population from 13 to 11 million. The ravages of the Thirty Year’s War most clearly felt in central Europe.

Population decline had many causes and rather remarkably, direct casualties from warfare were a very small component. The direct effect of war, the disruption of agriculture, and the spread of disease were far more devastating.

Spain alone lost a half million people at the turn of the century and another half million between 1647 and 1652. Severe outbreaks on 1625 and 1665 hit England, while France endured three consecutive years of epidemics from 1629 to 1631.

All sectors of the European economy from agriculture to trade stagnated or decline in early seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, peasants were hardest hit.

The entire period from 1647 to 1653 was the worst ever in parts of France. Five consecutive bad harvests decimated the countryside.

Predictably acute economic crisis led to rural revolt, as the French peasants reeled from visitations of plaque, frost and floods, the French state was raising the taille, the tax that fell most heavily upon the lower orders.

A series of French rural revolts in the late 1630s focused on opposition to tax increases.

These revolts began in the same way, with the murder of a local tax official, the organization of a peasant militia and the recruitment of local clergy and notables. The rebels forced temporarily concessions from local authorities, but they never achieved lasting reforms.

Each revolt ended with the re-imposition of order by the state. In England the largest rural protests, like the Midland revolts in 1607, centered upon opposition to the enclosure of grain fields and their conversion to pasture.

The most spectacular popular uprisings occurred in Spanish-occupied Italy. In the spring of 1647 the Sicilian city of Palermo exploded under the pressure of a disastrous harvest, rising food prices and relentless taxation. A city of 130,000 inhabitants, Palermo imported nearly all of its food stuff.

As grain prices rose, the city government subsidized the price of bread running up huge debts in the process. When the town government could no longer afford the subsidies they decided to reduce the size of the loaf rather than increase its price.

This did not fool the women of the city, who rioted when the first undersized loaves were placed on sale. Soon the entire city was in revolt. Commoners who were not part of the urban power structure led the revolt in Palermo. For a time they achieved the abolition of Spanish taxes on basic food stuff.

Their success provided the model for a similar uprising in Naples, the largest city in Europe.

The Neapolitan revolt began in 1647 after the Spanish placed new tax on fruit. A crowd gathered to protest the new imposition, burned the customs house, and murdered several local official. The protester were first led by a fisherman and then by a blacksmith, and again the rebels achieved the temporary suspension of Spanish taxation.
Reason to Resist In Europe (1550 – 1700)

The Bohemian Revolt

The Bohemian Revolt
By the beginning of the seventeenth century Catholicism and Protestantism had achieved a rough equality within the German states, symbolized by the fact that of the seven electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor, three were Catholic, three protestant and the seventh was emperor himself, acting as king of Bohemia.

But the delicate religious balance in central Europe presented difficulties as well as advantages. The appearance of Calvinism in Germany led to more Protestants converts the appearance of the Counter Reformation to more Catholic re-conversions,. Each change heightened anxieties. Every diplomatic marriage or contested inheritance threatened to upset balance. Protestant and Catholic states, fearful of the power of their rivals, formed separates defensive alliances. The arming of one camp incited the arming of the other.

Matters came to ahead in 1617 when Mathias, the childless Holy Roman Emperor, began making plans for his cousin, Ferdinand Habsburg, to succeed him. In order to ensure a Catholic majority among the electors, the Emperor relinquish his Bohemian title and pressed for Ferdinand election as the new king of Bohemian. On his own estates, Ferdinand abandoned the policy of toleration, Jesuit schools were founded and the precepts of the Council of Trent were enforced. Protestant preachers were barred from their office, their books publicly burned and thousands of common people were force to flee.

In May 1618 in Prague, a group of noblemen marched to the royal palace, found two king’s chief advisers and hurled them out of an upper story window. The official’s lives, if not their dignity, were preserved by the pile of manure in which they landed. This incident came to be known as The Defenestration of Prague.

This initiate a Protestant counter offensive throughout the Habsburg lands. Fear of Ferdinand’s policies led to Protestant uprising sin Hungary, as well as Bohemia. Those who seized control of government declared Ferdinand deposed and the throne vacant.
When Emperor Mathias died in 1619, the stalemate broken, Ferdinand succeeded to Imperial title as Ferdinand II (1619 – 1637) and Ferdinand V, one of the Protestant electors, accepted the Bohemian crown.
The Bohemian Revolt