Sámos

Samos lies in the eastern Aegean close to the coast of Anatolia. After a period associated with the Genoese Giustiniani family, it came under Ottoman rule in the late fifteenth century. Ottoman authorities later encouraged resettlement, granting privileges to newcomers including Greeks and Arvanites from other regions. Settlements developed largely inland before the coast became more densely occupied in the eighteenth century.

Samian merchants expanded their trading and shipping activities in the later eighteenth century. The island joined the Greek uprising in 1821 under Lykourgos Logothetis, and its inhabitants resisted Ottoman attempts to retake it. Excluded from the independent Greek state by the London Protocol of 1830, Samos became an autonomous tributary principality under Ottoman suzerainty.