Morosini, the commander of the Venetian mercenary army, successfully
conducted a series of campaigns between 1684 and 1687, but with terrible
barbarity on both sides. The Venetian fleet entered the Piraeus on
September 21, 1687. The city of Athens was immediately occupied by their
army, and siege laid to the Acropolis. On September 25 a Venetian bomb
blew up a powder magazine in the Propylaea, and the following evening
another fell in the Parthenon. The classic temple was partially ruined;
much of the sculpture which had retained its inimitable excellence from
the days of Phidaeas was defaced, and a part utterly destroyed. The Turks
persisted in defending the place until September 28, when, they
capitulated. The Venetians continued the campaign until the greater part
of Northern Greece submitted to their authority, and peace was declared
in 1696. During the Venetian occupation of Greece through the ravages of
war, oppressive taxation, and pestilence, the Greek inhabitants
decreased from 300,000 to about 100,000.

Sultan Achmet III., having checkmated Peter the Great in his attempt to
march to the conquest of Constantinople, assembled a large army at
Adrianople under the command of Ali Cumurgi, which expelled the
Venetians from Greece before the end of 1715. Peace was concluded, by
the Treaty of Passarovitz, in July 1718. Thereafter, the material and
political position of the Greek nation began to exhibit many signs of
improvement, and the agricultural population before the end of the
eighteenth century became, in the greatest part of the country, the
legal as well as the real proprietors of the soil, which made them feel
the moral sentiment of freemen.

The increased importance of the diplomatic relations of the Porte with
the Christian powers opened a new political career to the Greeks at
Constantinople, and gave rise to the formation of a class of officials
in the Othoman service called "phanariots," whose venality and illegal
exactions made the name a by-word for the basest servility, corruption,
and rapacity.

This system was extended to Wallachia and Moldavia, and no other
Christian race in the Othoman dominions was exposed to so long a period
of unmitigated extortion and cruelty as the Roman population of these
principalities. The Treaty of Kainardji which concluded the war with
Russia between 1768 and 1774, humbled the pride of the sultan, broke the
strength of the Othoman Empire, and established the moral i