Today in European history: the Greco-Turkish War is declared (1897)

After mainland Greece won its independence from the Ottomans in the 1832 Treaty of Constantinople, the status of the island of Crete became a big issue. Crete, as anybody who knows anything about ancient Greece will tell you, historically lies well within the Greek world. But our friends of the Fourth Crusade sold the island–which came into their possession when they took over the Byzantine Empire–to Venice, and so it became a Venetian colony in 1212. Venice held Crete, then known as the Kingdom of Candia, until the Cretan War ended in 1669 with the island under Ottoman control. Autonomous Egypt briefly controlled Crete in the early 19th century before it again reverted to the Ottomans.

This is just a placeholder. If you’d like to read the rest please check out my new home, Foreign Exchanges!

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.