This conflict was marked by the Pact of Halepa which ended it and accorded a certain number of concessions to the Cretan people.
Context[edit]
Beginning in 1645, the conquest of Crete by the Ottoman Empire was completed in 1669 with the end of the Siege of Candia. The Ottoman period of the history of the island was interspersed with insurrections. In 1821, Greece revolted against the Ottoman occupation, and Crete takes part in the Greek Revolution. But in 1830, in the end of the war, Crete wasn't a part of the new Greek State. The island passed under the authority of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, for the services to the Ottoman Empire in the Greek Revolution in the Peloponnese. This Egyptian parenthesis lasted no more than ten years, and in 1840, Crete returned to the authority of the Sultan. Despite a new attempt of insurrection of the Cretan people, Crete knew a period of relative peace until 1866.
On 30 March 1856, the Treaty of Paris obliged the sultan to apply the hatt-ı hümayun, that is to say the civil and religious equality of Christians and Muslims.[1] The Ottoman authorities in Crete were reluctant to carry out these reforms.[2] After the many conversions of Muslims (mostly old Christians who had converted to Islam and therefore relapses), the Empire tried to return to the liberty of conscience.[1]
The four following decades (until the independence in 1898), the revolts just follow the path opened by the hatt-ı hümayun.
The Cretan Revolt of 1866–1869 made advances for the Cretan people. On 11 November 1867, Ali proposed a new administrative project, the "Organic Law", with a certain number of privileges, notably a limited representation of the Cretan element in the administration of the island, tax breaks, the establishment of a bank and the full equivalence of two languages, Greek and Turkish.[3]
The international events that destabilised the Balkans (revolts of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1875 and of Bulgaria in 1876, intervention of Serbia and Montenegro on the side of the rebels) came to add to the ambient atmosphere. These movements encouraged the Christian community of Crete to demand reforms. A volition that was amplified while in 1875, the majority of the Christian representatives of the assembly weren't rural, but the doctors and the lawyers were often from the University of Athens.[4] The Cretan assembly forwarded to the Sultan, on 22 May 1876, a series of complaints whose the best representation of Christians in the assembly. On 2 August, the Porte made publicly obvious its denial to accede to all of the complaints, of the foundation of a bank, the establishment of an obligatory public school and the right to publish newspapers.[4]
Another cause of the uprising of 1878 was the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877. The start of war of Russia against the Ottoman Empire was viewed as an opportunity for the Cretan people to revolt.
The Ottoman Empire, satisfied knowing the idea of union of Crete with Greece was rejected by the European Powers, accepted to make concessions towards the Cretan population. On October 1878, the Pact of Halepa put an end to the insurrection. This treaty took the name of the contemporary district of Halepa, in Chania.
The Pact of Halepa transformed Crete into a semi-autonomous province with specific privileges. Ratified by a firman of the Sultan on 9 November 1878,[9] the main measures of the treaty were:
The constitution accorded by the Pact of Halepa can't, in law, be modified by the Ottoman constitution. The first governor was Alexander Karatheodori Pasha.