The sea borne trade of the Ottoman Empire was predominantly in Greek hands there were many Armenian Turkish Arab and Jewish merchants but they kept to the land In the late eighteenth century trade substantially increased and Greek seafarers did well out of it In the Aegean islands especially Hydra and Chios bigger and more modern ships were built and shipbuilding and trading families made substantial fortunes It is important to note that the Greek population was widely and thinly distributed within the Ottoman Empire and that there were also Greek communities in foreign cities In the peninsula and the Aegean islands the population was compactly Greek though considerable numbers of Turks dwelt among them in some of the towns Greeks formed large urban minorities in Constantinople Alexandria Bucharest Iasi the ports of the lower Danube and in the coastal cities of Asia Minor both in the Aegean and the Black Sea There were also many Greek villages in the interior of Asia Minor Outside the Ottoman Empire the lonian islands had a mainly Greek population They belonged to the republic of Venice until 1797 were then occupied in turn by French Russians and British and came into British possession by the Vienna peace settlement Further a field there were Greek merchant communities in Trieste Venice Vienna Amsterdam and other West European cities During the eighteenth century European education and ideas made themselves felt among a considerable part of the Greek people The Phanariot princes of Moldavia and Wallachia supported some excellent schools and collected libraries of European books Knowledge of French was quite widespread at their courts Constantinople also had good schools and foreign languages were spoken and foreign literature read Wealthy islanders founded schools from their trade and profits Under Venetian rule the Ionian Islands offered Greeks the chance of education and access to Italian culture Small but growing numbers of Greeks from the Ottoman Empire studied abroad especially at Padua but also at Vienna Leipzig and other German universities Greek colonies in Western Europe helped the education of their compatriots both by inviting individuals to study in the West and by sending money to found and support schools on ottoman territory Increasing contact with the West introduced the ideas of the European Enlightenment to Greeks This process was encouraged by many of the Phanariot rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia but was disapproved by the patriarchate although individual priests and even bishops favoured it Natural science and rationalism were felt as a threat to Orthodox piety Especially important was the cult of ancient Greece in European Enlightenment literature Classical learning and thought were praised by the philosophers of the West as older than and superior to Christianity Greeks in the West learned through this literature about their own past which if not entirely ignored had at least been very little known to the intellectual elite of Constantinople either in the last period of the Byzantine empire or under Ottoman rule The presentation to the educated Greek public of ancient Hellas as seen through the eyes of French encyclopaedists and sentimental Western philhellenes was above all the work of Adamantios Korais 174 8 1833 A native of Smyrna who had spent six years in Amsterdam and six in Montpellier and from 1788 until the end of his long life lived in Paris Korais was an indefatigable author of translations original works articles and letters He devoted himself to the propagation of the Enlightenment among the Greeks and of the Greek cause among the French and above all to the development of a literary Modern Greek Language to be formed by the infusion of classical words into the spoken tongue and by the systematisation of its formal structure Korais took care not to attack religion or the Orthodox Church as such but he fought bitterly against all customs institutions and ideas which seemed to him to be superstitious survivals from an age of darkness preventing a return to a glorious past which would also embody in itself all the wisdom of new enlightened Europe The Orthodox hierarchy disliked this mixture of classics and rationalism They too were becoming impatient of Ottoman rule as they saw it declining they too were becoming affected by a new pride in being Greeks But if the Ottoman empire were to be destroyed and this did not seem imminent nor did it seem wise to take big risks on so distant a prospect they hoped that it would be replaced by something like the old Byzantine empire based on autocracy and Ortho