Στο Concise History of Greece ο Richard Clogg γράφει:
Moreover, throughout the period of the Tourkokratia, the klefts afforded a visible and suggestive example of pre-nationalist armed resistance to the Turks. The klefts were essentially bandits whose depredations were directed against Greeks and Turks alike. But their attacks on such visible symbols of Ottoman power as tax collectors led to their being seen in the popular imagination as the defenders of the oppressed Greek raya against their Muslim overlords and to their being credited with almost superhuman powers of bravery and endurance. In an effort to control brigandage, and to ensure the safety of the mountain passes that were essential for the maintenance of trade and imperial communications, the Ottomans established Christian militia forces known as armatoloi. (σελίδα 15)
Rigas’ endeavours may have had no practical outcome but nonetheless they thoroughly alarmed both the Ottoman authorities and the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, coinciding as they did with the occupation by the French, with all the panoply of ‘revolutionary liberation’, of the Ionian islands in 1797. This, combined with Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire, in the following year, 1798, brought the godless and seditious doctrines of the French Revolution to the very borders of the Empire. The Serbian revolt of 1804, initially a reaction against intolerable oppression by the janissaries but gradually acquiring the character of a national uprising, was an encouraging demonstration of Ottoman vulnerability which was seized upon by the anonymous author of the Hellenic Nomarchy (1806), the most remarkable political tract of the independence period. When the Ionian islands, as part of the settlement at the Congress of Vienna, were in 1815 established as a nominally independent state, under British protection, they afforded a suggestive example of an area of Greek territory not under Ottoman rule. (σελίδα 29)
Οι αποδόσεις του suggestive στην τρίτη ελληνική έκδοση είναι:
...οι κλέφτες αποτελούσαν ορατό και εύγλωττο παράδειγμα της προεπαναστατικής ένοπλης αντίστασης κατά των Τούρκων
...αποτέλεσαν ένα ενδεικτικό παράδειγμα περιοχής επί ελληνικού εδάφους...
