Justice as a cause of the 1821 Greek Revolution

Abstract

What we shall be looking at is how justice was seen, by the Ottomans, by the monarchs of Europe, and by the Greeks. What the Ottomans understood by justice was preserving the power they had over their enslaved peoples; keeping absolute jurisdiction over the lives, the honour and the property of the rayahs, behaving towards them arbitrarily and barbarously, and holding their Christian subjects obligated to work for them in order to assure their conquerors the necessaries of life. After the fall of Napoleon, the monarchs of Europe decided both within their own boundaries and beyond them to apply "the sacred principles of religion, justice and peace". It is, however, a commonplace that what these monarchs understood by justice was keeping their peoples enslaved and using bloody military intervention to repress any popular aspirations to freedom, as exemplified by events in Italy and Spain. What the Greeks understood by justice was what the ordinary man understands by this word, namely, having what belonged to them, as the people they were.