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The gentlemanly Phanariots had fallen into the background. Mavrokordatos only retained influence in north-western Greece. In Peloponnesos the Primates were all-powerful, and Kolokotrónis the klepht was meditating a popular dictatorship at their expense.
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.
During the eighteenth century the highest officials in the empire were invariably Phanariots, as the Constantinople Greeks were termed from the quarter of the city in which they resided. In speaking of the Greeks I have not had in mind the inhabitants of the present kingdom of Greece.
Meanwhile, the diverse ambitions of the higher clergy and the phanariots at Constantinople taught the people of Greece that their interests as a nation were not always identical with the policy of the leaders of the Orthodox Church.
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