[5] As Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II had no army of his own available, he was forced to seek the aid of his rebellious vassal and rival, Muhammad Ali of Egypt, who sent an expedition to the island.

[6] Britain decided that Crete should not become part of the new Kingdom of Greece on its independence in 1830, evidently for fear that it would become a centre of piracy, as it had often been in the past, or a Russian naval base in the East Mediterranean.

Mustafa Pasha angled unsuccessfully to become a semi-independent Prince of Greece, but the Christian Cretans instead of supporting him, rebelled and once more drove the Muslims temporarily into siege in the towns.

He remained there until 1851 when he was summoned to Constantinople, where, despite relatively advanced age (his early fifties) he had a successful career, he became grand vizier several times.

After Greece had achieved its independence, Crete became an object of contention, as the Christian part of its population revolted several times against Ottoman rule.

Ottoman Grand Vizier A'ali Pasha personally assumed control of the Ottoman forces and launched a methodical campaign to retake the rural districts, which was combined with promises of political concessions, notably by the introduction of an Organic Law, which gave the Cretan Christians equal (in practice, because of their superior numbers, majority) control of local administration.

[2] During the Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878, there was a further rebellion, which was halted quickly by the intervention of the British and the adaptation of the 1867-8 Organic Law into a constitutional settlement, known as the Pact of Halepa.

When a small insurgency began in September 1895, it spread quickly, and by the summer of 1896 the Ottoman forces had lost military control of most of the island.

The new uprising led to the dispatch of a Greek expeditionary force to the island, culminating in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 in which Greece suffered a heavy defeat.

It also bombarded Cretan insurgent forces, placed sailors and marines ashore and instituted a blockade of Crete and key ports in Greece, which ended organised combat on the island by late March 1897.

Rural Turks and Bashibazuks (irregular Turkish troops), goaded by the appointment of Stylianos M. Alexiou as the first Christian director of the Revenue Service, on 6 September 1898 (25 August 1898 according to the Julian calendar then in use on Crete, which was 12 days behind the modern Gregorian calendar during the 19th century), as the new clerks were on their way to start work in the town customs house, attacked them and the British detachment escorting them.

A Turkish mob rapidly spread throughout the town, as Cretan Greek houses and shops were pillaged and buildings were torched, particularly in the area then known as Vezir Çarşı, the modern-day 25 August Street.

[16] According to the 17th-century English diplomat and historian Paul Rycaut, the Orthodox population welcomed Ottomans as liberators from the "oppressive rule of Roman Catholic Italians" and "began to undergo conversion to Islam in substantial numbers".