  Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions-The Greek Church-Communal System-The ÆgÆan Islands-The Phanariots-Greek Intellectual Revival; Koraes-Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the French Revolution and Napoleon-The HetÆria Philike-Hypsilanti's Attempt in the Danubian Provinces; its Failure-Revolt of the Morea: Massacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople-Attitude of Russia, Austria, and England-Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at Hydra-The Greek Leaders-Fall of Tripolitza-The Massacre of Chios- Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822-Dissensions of the Greeks-Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid-Ibrahim conquers Crete and invades the Morea-Siege of Missolonghi-Philhellenism in Europe-Russian Proposal for Intervention-Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander: Accession of Nicholas-Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg- Anglo-Russian Protocol-Treaty between England, Russia, and France-Death of Canning-Navarino-War between Russia and Turkey-Campaigns of 1828 and 1829-Treaty of Adrianople-Capodistrias President of Greece-Leopold accepts and then declines the Greek Crown-Murder of Capodistrias-Otho, King of Greece. [Greece in the Napoleonic age.] Of the Christian races which at the beginning of the third decade of this century peopled the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek was that which had been least visibly affected by the political and military events of the Napoleonic age. Servia, after a long struggle, had in the year 1817 gained local autonomy under its own princes, although Turkish troops still garrisoned its fortresses, and the sovereignty of the Sultan was acknowledged by the payment of tribute. The Romanic districts, Wallachia and Moldavia, which, in the famous interview of Tilsit, Napoleon had bidden the Czar to make his own, were restored by Russia to the Porte in the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, but under conditions which virtually established a Russian protectorate. Greece, with the exception of the Ionian Islands, had neither been the scene of any military operations, nor formed the subject of any treaty. Yet the age of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars had silently wrought in the Greek nation the last of a great series of changes which fitted it to take its place among the free peoples of Europe. The signs were there from which those who could read the future might have gathered that the political resurrection of Greece was near at hand. There were some who, with equal insight and patriotism, sought during this period to lay the intellectual foundation for that national independence which they foresaw that their children would win with the sword. [Greece in the eighteenth century.] The forward movement of the Greek nation may be said, in general terms, to have become visible during the first half of the eighteenth century. Serfage had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a farmer paying a rent in kind for his land. In the gradual and unobserved emancipation of the labouring class the first condition of national revival had already been fulfilled. The peasantry had been formed which, when the conflict with the Turk broke out, bore the brunt of the long struggle. In comparison with the Prussian serf, the Greek cultivator at the beginning of the eighteenth century was an independent man: in comparison with the English labourer, he was well fed and well housed. The evils to which the Greek population was exposed, wherever Greeks and Turks lived together, were those which brutalised or degraded the Christian races in every Ottoman province. There was no redress for injury inflicted by a Mohammedan official or neighbour. If a wealthy Turk murdered a Greek in the fields, burnt down his house, and outraged his family, there was no court where the offender could be brought to justice. The term by which the Turk described his Christian neighbour was "our rayah," that is, "our subject." A Mohammedan landowner might terrorise the entire population around him, carry off the women, flog and imprison the men, and yet feel that he had committed no offence against the law; for no law existed but the Koran, and no Turkish court of justice but that of the Kadi, where the complaint of the Christian passed for nothing. This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The second great and general evil was the extortion practised by the tax-gatherers, and this fell upon the poorer Mohammedans equally with the Christians, except in regard to the poll-tax, or haratsch, the badge of servitude, which was levied on Christians alone. All land paid tithe to the State; and until the tax-gatherer had paid his visit it was not permitted to the peasant to cut the ripe crop. This rule enabled the tax-gatherer, whether a Mohammedan or a Christian, to inflict ruin upon those who did not bribe himself or his masters; for by merely postponing his visit he could destroy the value of the harvest. Round this central institution of tyranny and waste, there gathered, except in the districts protected by municipal privileges, every form of corruption natural to a society where the State heard no appeals, and made no inquiry into the processes employed by those to whom it sold the taxes. What was possible in the way of extortion was best seen in the phenomenon of well-built villages being left tenantless, and the population of rich districts dying out in a time of peace, without pestilence, without insurrection, without any greater wrong on the part of the Sultan's government than that normal indifference which permitted the existence of a community to depend upon the moderation or the caprice of the individual possessors of force. [Origin of modern Greece Byzantine, not classic.] [Slavonic and Albanian elements.] Such was the framework, or, as it may be said, the common-law of the mixed Turkish and Christian society of the Ottoman Empire. On this background we have now to trace the social and political features which stood out in Greek life, which preserved the race from losing its separate nationality, and which made the ultimate recovery of its independence possible. In the first outburst of sympathy and delight with which every generous heart in western Europe hailed the standard of Hellenic freedom upraised in 1821, the twenty centuries which separated the Greece of literature from the Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of the Greeks; and it produced a false impression of the causes which had led up to the war of independence, and of the qualities, the habits, the bonds of union, which exercised the greatest power over the nation. These were, to a great extent, unlike anything existing in the ancient world; they had originated in Byzantine, not in classic Greece; and where the scenes of old Hellenic history appeared to be repeating themselves, it was due more to the continuing influence of the same seas and the same mountains than to the survival of any political fragments of the past. The Greek population had received a strong Slavonic infusion many centuries before. More recently, Albanian settlers had expelled the inhabitants from certain districts both in the mainland and in the Morea. Attica, Boeotia, Corinth, and Argolis were at the outbreak of the war of independence peopled in the main by a race of Albanian descent, who still used, along with some Greek, the Albanian [The Greek Church.] [Lower clergy.] [The Patriarch an imperial functionary.] [The Bishops civil magistrates.] The central element in modern Greek life was the religious profession of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Where, as in parts of Crete, the Greek adopted Mohammedanism, all the other elements of his nationality together did not prevent him from amalgamating with the Turk. The sound and popular forces of the Church belonged to the lower clergy, who, unlike the priests of the Roman Church, were married and shared the life of the people. If ignorant and bigoted, they were nevertheless the real guardians of national spirit; and if their creed was a superstition rather than a religion, it at least kept the Greeks in a wholesome antagonism to the superstition of their masters. The higher clergy stood in many respects in a different position. The Patriarch of Constantinople was a great officer of the Porte. His dignities and his civil jurisdiction had been restored and even enlarged by the Mohammedan conquerors of the Greek Empire, with the express object of employing the Church as a means of securing obedience to themselves: and it was quite in keeping with the history of this great office that, when the Greek national insurrection at last broke out, the Patriarch Gregorius IV. should have consented, though unwillingly, to launch the curse of the Church against it. The Patriarch gained his office by purchase, or through intrigues at the Divan; he paid an enormous annual backsheesh for it; and he was liable to be murdered or deposed as soon as his Mussulman patrons lost favour with the Sultan, or a higher bid was made for his office by a rival ecclesiastic. To satisfy the claims of the Palace the Patriarch was compelled to be an extortioner himself. The bishoprics in their turn were sold in his ante-chambers, and the Bishops made up the purchase-money by fleecing their clergy. But in spite of a deserved reputation for venality, the Bishops in Greece exercised very great influence, both as ecclesiastics and as civil magistrates. Whether their jurisdiction in lawsuits between Christians arose from the custom of referring disputes to their arbitration or was expressly granted to them by the Sultan, they virtually displaced in all Greek communities the court of the Kadi, and afforded the merchant or the farmer a tribunal where his own law was administered in his own language. Even a Mohammedan in dispute with a Christian would sometimes consent to bring the matter before the Bishops' Court rather than enforce his right to obtain the dilatory and capricious decision of an Ottoman judge. [Communal organisation.] [The Morea.] The condition of the Greeks living in the country that now forms the Hellenic Kingdom and in the ÆgÆan Islands exhibited strong local contrasts. It was, however, common to all that, while the Turk held the powers of State in his hand, the details of local administration in each district were left to the inhabitants, the Turk caring nothing about these matters so long as the due amount of taxes was paid and the due supply of sailors provided. The apportionment of taxes among households and villages seems to have been the germ of self-government from which several types of municipal organisation, some of them of great importance in the history of the Greek nation, developed. In the Paschalik of the Morea the taxes were usually farmed by the Voivodes, or Beys, the Turkish governors of the twenty-three provinces into which the Morea was divided. But in each village or township the inhabitants elected officers called Proestoi, who, besides collecting the taxes and managing the affairs of their own communities, met in a district-assembly, and there determined what share of the district-taxation each community should bear. One Greek officer, called Primate, and one Mohammedan, called Ayan, were elected to represent the district, and to take part in the council of the Pasha of the Morea, who resided at Tripolitza. [Northern Greece. The Armatoli and the Klephts.] On the north of the Gulf of Corinth the features of the communal system were less distinct than in the Morea. There was, however, in the mountain-country of Ætolia and Pindus a rough military organisation which had done great service to Greece in keeping alive the national spirit and habits of personal independence. The Turks had found a local militia established in this wild region at the time of their conquest, and had not interfered with it for some centuries. The Armatoli, or native soldiery, recruited from peasants, shepherds, and muleteers, kept Mohammedan influences at a distance, until, in the eighteenth century, the Sultans made it a fixed rule of policy to diminish their numbers and to reduce the power of their captains. Before 1820 the Armatoli had become comparatively few and weak; but as they declined, bands of Klephts, or brigands, grew in importance; and the mountaineer who was no longer allowed to practise arms as a guardian of order, enlisted himself among the robbers. Like the freebooters of our own northern border, these brigands became the heroes of song. Though they plundered the Greek as well as the Mohammedan, the national spirit approved their exploits. It was, no doubt, something, that the physical energy of the marauder and the habit of encountering danger should not be wholly on the side of the Turk and the Albanian. But the influence of the Klephts in sustaining Greek nationality has been overrated. They had but recently become numerous, and the earlier organisation of the northern Armatoli was that to which the sound and vigorous character of the Greek peasantry in these regions, the finest part of the Greek race on the mainland, was really due. [The ÆgÆan Islands.] [Chios.] In the islands of the ÆgÆan the condition of the Greeks was on the whole happy and prosperous. Some of these islands had no Turkish population; in others the caprice of a Sultana, the goodwill of the Capitan Pasha who governed the Archipelago, or the judicious offer of a sum of money when money was wanted by the Porte, had so lightened the burden of Ottoman sovereignty, that the Greek island-community possessed more liberty than was to be found in any part of Europe, except Switzerland. The taxes payable to the central government, including the haratsch or poll-tax levied on all Christians, had often been commuted for a fixed sum, which was raised without the interposition of the Turkish tax-gatherer. In Hydra, Spetza, and Psara, the so-called nautical islands, the supremacy of the Turk was felt only in the obligation to furnish sailors to the Ottoman navy, and in the payment of a tribute of about £100 per annum. The government of these three islands was entirely in the hands of the inhabitants. In Chios, though a considerable Mussulman population existed by the side of the Greek, there was every sign of peace and prosperity. Each island bore its own peculiar social character, and had its municipal institutions of more or less value. The Hydriote was quarrelsome, turbulent, quick to use the knife, but outspoken, honest in dealing, and an excellent sailor. The picture of Chian life, as drawn even by those who have judged the Greeks most severely, is one of singular beauty and interest; the picture of a self-governing society in which the family trained the citizen in its own bosom, and in which, while commerce enriched all, the industry of the poor within their homes and in their gardens was refined by the practice of an art. The skill which gave its value to the embroidery and to the dyes of Chios was exercised by those who also worked the hand-loom and cultivated the mastic and the rose. The taste and the labour of man requited nature's gifts of sky, soil, and sea; and in the pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown. [The Greeks have ecclesiastical power in other Turkish provinces.] The territory where the Greeks formed the great majority of the population included, beyond the boundaries of the present Hellenic Kingdom, the islands adjacent to the coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Chalcidic peninsula in Macedonia. But the activity of the race was not confined within these limits. If the Greek was a subject in his own country, he was master in the lands of some of his neighbours. A Greek might exercise power over other Christian subjects of the Porte either as an ecclesiastic, or as the delegate of the Sultan in certain fixed branches of the administration. The authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognised over the whole of the European provinces of Turkey, except Servia. The Bishops in all these provinces were Greeks; the services of the Church were conducted in the Greek tongue; the revenues of the greater part of the Church-lands, and the fees of all the ecclesiastical courts, went into Greek pockets. In things religious, and in that wide range of civil affairs which in communities belonging to the Eastern Church appertains to the higher religious office, the Greeks had in fact regained the ascendancy which they had possessed under the Byzantine Empire. The dream of the Churchman was not the creation of an independent kingdom of Greece, but the restoration of the Eastern Empire under Greek supremacy. When it was seen that the Slav and the Rouman came to the Greek for law, for commercial training, for religious teaching, and looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as the ultimate judge of all disputes, it was natural that the belief should arise that, when the Turk passed away, the Greek would step into his place. But the influence of the Greeks, great as it appeared to be, did not in reality reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of assimilation at work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home. [The Phanariot officials of the Porte.] [Greek Hospodars.] Four great offices of the Ottoman Empire were always held by Greeks. These were the offices of [Greek intellectual movement in the eighteenth century.] The knowledge of ancient Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood, but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that the Greek learnt to call himself Hellen, the name of his forefathers, instead of Romaios, a Roman. As the new schools grew up and the old ones were renovated or transformed, education ceased to be merely literary. In the second half of the eighteenth century science returned in a humble form to the land that had given it birth, and the range of instruction was widened by men who had studied law, physics, and moral philosophy at foreign Universities. Something of the liberal spirit of the inquirers of Western Europe arose among the best Greek teachers. Though no attack was made upon the doctrines of the Church, and no direct attack was made upon the authority of the Sultan, the duty of religious toleration was proclaimed in a land where bigotry had hitherto reigned supreme, and the political freedom of ancient Greece was held up as a glorious ideal to a less happy age. Some of the higher clergy and of the Phanariot instruments of Turkish rule took fright at the independent spirit of the new learning, and for a while it seemed as if the intellectual as well as the political progress of Greece might be endangered by ecclesiastical ill-will. But the attachment of the Greek people to the Church was so strong and so universal that, although satire might be directed against the Bishops, a breach with the Church formed no part of the design of any patriot. The antagonism between episcopal and national feeling, strongest about the end of the eighteenth century, declined during succeeding years, and had almost disappeared before the outbreak of the war of liberation. [Koraes, 1748-1833.] [The language of Modern Greece.] The greatest scholar of modern Greece was also one of its greatest patriots. Koraes, known as the legislator of the Greek language, was born in 1748, of Chian parents settled at Smyrna. The love of learning, combined with an extreme independence of character, made residence insupportable to him in a land where the Turk was always within sight, and where few opportunities existed for gaining wide knowledge. His parents permitted him to spend some years at Amsterdam, where a branch of their business was established. Recalled to Smyrna at the age of thirty, Koraes almost abandoned human society. The hand of a beautiful heiress could not tempt him from the austere and solitary life of the scholar; and quitting his home, he passed through the medical school of Montpellier, and settled at Paris. He was here when the French Revolution began. The inspiration of that time gave to his vast learning and inborn energy a directly patriotic aim. For forty years Koraes pursued the work of serving Greece by the means open to the scholar. The political writings in which he addressed the Greeks themselves or appealed to foreigners in favour of Greece, admirable as they are, do not form the basis of his fame. The peculiar task of Koraes was to give to the reviving Greek nation the national literature and the form of expression which every civilised people reckons among its most cherished bonds of unity. Master, down to the minutest details, of the entire range of Greek writings, and of the history of the Greek language from classical times down to our own century, Koraes was able to select the Hellenic authors, Christian as well as Pagan, whose works were best suited for his countrymen in their actual condition, and to illustrate them as no one could who had not himself been born and bred among Greeks. This was one side of Koraes' literary task. The other was to direct the language of the future Hellenic kingdom into its true course. Classical writing was still understood by the educated in Greece, but the spoken language of the people was something widely different. Turkish and Albanian influences had barbarised the vocabulary; centuries of ignorance had given play to every natural irregularity of local dialect. When the restoration of Greek independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he recommended that the forms of classical Greek, where they were not wholly obsolete, should be fixed in the grammar of the language. While ridiculing the attempt to restore modes of expression which, even in the written language, had wholly passed out of use, he proposed to expunge all words that were in fact not Greek at all, but foreign, and to replace them by terms formed according to the natural laws of the language. The Greek, therefore, which Koraes desired to see his countrymen recognise as their language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements, and methodised by a constant reference to a classical model, which, however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to that of classical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening Hellenic civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. The political object of Koraes has been completely attained. No people in Europe is now prouder of its native tongue, or turns it to better account in education, than his countrymen. In literature, the renovated language has still its work before it. The lyric poetry that has been written in Greece since the time of Koraes is not wanting, if a foreigner may express an opinion, in tenderness and grace The writer who shall ennoble Greek prose with the energy and directness of the ancient style has yet to arise [Development of Greek commerce, 1750-1820.] [The Treaty of Kainardji, 1774.] The intellectual advance of the Greeks in the eighteenth century was closely connected with the development of their commerce, and this in its turn was connected with events in the greater cycle of European history. A period of comparative peace and order in the Levantine waters, following the final expulsion of the Venetians from the Morea in 1718, gave play to the natural aptitude of the Greek islanders for coasting-trade. Then ships, still small and unfit to venture on long voyages, plied between the harbours in the ÆgÆan and in the Black Sea, and brought profit to their owners in spite of the imposition of burdens from which not only many of the Mussulman subjects of the Sultan, but foreign nations protected by commercial treaties, were free. It was at this epoch, after Venice had lost its commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Russia began to exercise a direct influence upon the fortunes of Greece. The Empress Catherine had formed the design of conquering Constantinople, and intended, under the title of Protectress of the Christian Church, to use the Greeks as her allies. In the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey in 1768, a Russian expeditionary force landed in the Morea, and the Greeks were persuaded to take up arms. The Moreotes themselves paid dearly for the trust which they had placed in the orthodox Empress. They were virtually abandoned to the vengeance of their oppressors; but to Greece at large the conditions on which peace was made proved of immense benefit. The Treaty of Kainardji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the express right to make representations at Constantinople on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of the Danubian provinces; it also bound the Sultan to observe certain conditions in his treatment of the Greek islanders. Out of these clauses, Russian diplomacy constructed a general right of interference on behalf of any Christian subjects of the Porte. The Treaty also opened the Black Sea to Russian ships of commerce, and conferred upon Russia the commercial privileges of the most favoured [Foundation of Odessa, 1792.] [Death of Rhegas, 1798.] [Influence of the French Revolution on Greece.] Before the end of the eighteenth century another war between Turkey and Russia, resulting in the cession of the district of Oczakoff on the northern shore of the Black Sea, made the Greeks both carriers and vendors of the corn-export of Southern Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of £3,000 to be a large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much of the Mediterranean trade that was lost by France and its dependencies. The increasing intelligence of the people was shown in the fact that foreigners were no longer employed by Greek merchants as their travelling agents in distant countries; there were countrymen enough of their own who could negotiate with an Englishman or a Dane in his own language. The richest Greeks were no doubt those of Odessa and Salonica, not of Hellas proper; but even the little islands of Hydra and Spetza, the refuge of the Moreotes whom Catherine had forsaken in 1770, now became communities of no small wealth and spirit. Psara, which was purely Greek, formed with these Albanian colonies the nucleus of an ÆgÆan naval Power. The Ottoman Government, cowed by its recent defeats, and perhaps glad to see the means of increasing its resources, made no attempt to check the growth of the Hellenic armed marine. Under the very eyes of the Sultan, the Hydriote and Psarian captains, men as venturesome as the sea-kings of ancient Greece, accumulated the artillery which was hereafter to hold its own against many an Ottoman man-of-war, and to sweep the Turkish merchantmen from the ÆgÆan. Eighteen years before the Greek insurrection broke out, Koraes, calling the attention of Western Europe to the progress made by his country, wrote the following significant words:-"If the Ottoman Government could have foreseen that the Greeks would create a merchant-navy, composed of several hundred vessels, most of them regularly armed, it would have crushed the movement at its commencement. It is impossible to calculate the effects which may result from the creation of this marine, or the influence which it may exert both upon the destiny of the oppressed nation and upon that of its oppressors." [The Ionian Islands. 1798-1815.] [Ali Pasha, 1798-1821.] From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under the protection of the Czar and the Sultan. It was in the native administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias, whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives, some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes, vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers, merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital. [The HetÆria Philike.] The secret society, which under the name of HetÆria Philike, or association of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte. The founders of this society were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire. It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress of Vienna, was in fact this political association in disguise. The real chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a general massacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the HetÆria was an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the adjacent countries, had joined the association. The Turkish Government had received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart, that the right and the duty of resistance is felt. [Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.] Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs of the HetÆria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the HetÆria besought him to place himself at its head. Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from assisting Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous enterprise. He rejected the offers of the HetÆrists, who then turned to a soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to believe that if Greece once rose in arms the assistance of Russia could not long be withheld. [The HerÆrist plan.] In October, 1820, the leading HetÆrists met in council at Ismail to decide whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty of Bucharest to send no troops into the Principalities without the Czar's consent. It does not appear that the HetÆrists had yet formed any calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks, or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne. The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus. Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him, reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia. [Hypsilanti in Roumania March, 1821.] The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821, while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon Bucharest. On the 16th of March the HetÆrists began their own insurrection by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down. Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Jassy with a few hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos, the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men, some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Jassy. The roads to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing on the north of the Danube. [The Czar disavows the movement.] But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar, who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men to put down the revolution in Piedmont. He received with dismay a letter from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was published by the Russian Consul at Jassy declaring that the Czar repudiated and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers. Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the revolutions of Italy and Spain. [The enterprise fails.] The disavowal of the HetÆrist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to assist him in his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his treason to the HetÆrist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged. The Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled ignobly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in the explosion, together with his assailants. [Revolt of Morea, April 2, 1891.] The HetÆrist invasion of the Principalities had ended in total failure, and with it there passed away for ever the dream of re-establishing the Eastern Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain reliance upon foreign aid and in blind assumption of leadership over an alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in the real home of the Hellenes, in the Morea and the islands of the ÆgÆan. Soon after Hypsilanti's appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the Morea, anticipating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the decision passed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the Morea. The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. "The Turk," they sang in their war-songs, "shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the whole earth." This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men, women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred, the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer. [Terrorism at Constantinople.] [Execution of the Patriarch, April 22.] The news of the revolt of the Morea and of the massacre of Mohammedans reached Constantinople, striking terror into the politicians of the Turkish capital, and rousing the Sultan Mahmud to a vengeance tiger-like in its ferocity, but deliberate and calculated like every bloody deed of this resolute and able sovereign. Reprisals had already been made upon the Greeks at Constantinople for the acts of Hypsilanti, and a number of innocent persons had been put to death by the executioner, but no general attack upon the Christians had been suggested, nor had the work of punishment passed out of the hands of the government itself. Now, however, the fury of the Mohammedan populace was let loose upon the infidel. The Sultan called upon his subjects to arm themselves in defence of their faith. Executions were redoubled; soldiers and mobs devastated Greek settlements on the Bosphorus; and on the most sacred day of the Greek Church a blow was struck which sent a thrill over Eastern Europe. The Patriarch of Constantinople had celebrated the service which ushers in the dawn of Easter Sunday, when he was summoned by the Dragoman of the Porte to appear before a Synod hastily assembled. There an order of the Sultan was read declaring Gregorius IV. a traitor, and degrading him from his office. The Synod was commanded to elect his successor. It did so. While the new Archbishop was receiving his investiture, Gregorius was led out, and was hanged, still wearing his sacred robes, at the gate of his palace. His body remained during Easter Sunday and the two following days at the place of execution. It was then given to the Jews to be insulted, dragged through the streets, and cast into the sea. The Archbishops of Adrianople, Salonica, and Tirnovo suffered death on the same Easter Sunday. The body of Gregorius, floating in the waves, was picked up by a Greek ship and carried to Odessa. Brought, as it was believed, by a miracle to Christian soil, the relics of the Patriarch received at the hands of the Russian government the funeral honours of a martyr. Gregorius had no doubt had dealings with the HetÆrists; but he was put to death untried; and whatever may have been the real extent of his offence, he was executed not for this but in order to strike terror into the Sultan's Christian subjects. [Massacre of Christians, April-October.] [Effect on Russia.] [Russian ambassador leaves Constantinople, July 27.] During the succeeding months, in Asia Minor as well as in Macedonia and at Constantinople itself, there were wholesale massacres of the Christians, and the churches of the Greeks were pillaged or destroyed by their enemies, both Jews and Turks. Smyrna, Adrianople, and Salonica, in so far as these towns were Greek, were put to the sack; thousands of the inhabitants were slain by the armed mobs who held command, or were sold into slavery. It was only the fear of a war with Russia which at length forced Sultan Mahmud to stop these deeds of outrage and to restore some of the conditions of civilised life in the part of his dominions which was not in revolt. The Russian army and nation would have avenged the execution of the Patriarch by immediate war if popular instincts had governed its ruler. Strogonoff, the ambassador at Constantinople, at once proposed to the envoys of the other Powers to unite in calling up war-ships for the protection of the Christians. Joint action was, however, declined by Lord Strangford, the representative of England, and the Porte was encouraged by the attitude of this politician to treat the threats of Strogonoff with indifference. There was an interval during which the destiny of a great part of Eastern Europe depended upon the fluctuations of a single infirm will. The Czar had thoroughly identified himself while at Laibach with the principles and the policy of European conservatism, and had assented to the declaration in which Metternich placed the Greek rebellion, together with the Spanish and Italian insurrections, under the ban of Europe. Returning to St. Petersburg, Alexander, in spite of the veil that intercepts from every sovereign the real thoughts and utterances of his people, found himself within the range of widely different influences. Russian passions were not roused by what might pass in Italy or Spain. The Russian priest, the soldier, the peasant understood nothing of theories of federal intervention, and of the connection between Neapolitan despotism and the treaties of 1815: but his blood boiled when he heard that the chief priest of his Church had been murdered by the Sultan, and that a handful of his brethren were fighting for their faith unhelped. Alexander felt to some extent the throb of national spirit. There had been a time in his life when a single hour of strong emotion or of overpowering persuasion had made him renounce every obligation and unite with Napoleon against his own allies; and there were those who in 1821 believed that the Czar would as suddenly break loose from his engagements with Metternich and throw himself, with a fanatical army and nation, into a crusade against the Turk. Sultan Mahmud had himself given to the Russian party of action a ground for denouncing him in the name of Russian honour and interests independently of all that related to Greece. In order to prevent the escape of suspected persons, the Porte had ordered Russian vessels to be searched at Constantinople, and it had forced all corn-ships coming from the Euxine to discharge their cargoes at the Bosphorus, under the apprehension that the corn-supplies of the capital would be cut off by Greek vessels in command of the ÆgÆan. Further, Russia had by treaty the right to insist that the Danubian Principalities should be governed by their civil authorities, the Hospodars, and not by Turkish Pashas, insurrection in Wallachia had been put down, but the rule of Hospodars had not been restored; Turkish generals, at the head of their forces, still administered their provinces under military law. On all these points Russia had at least the semblance of grievances of its own. The outrages which shocked all Europe were not the only wrong which Russian pride called upon the Czar to redress. The influence of Capodistrias revived at St. Petersburg. A despatch was sent to Constantinople declaring that the Porte had begun a war for life or death with the Christian religion, and that its continued existence among the Powers of Europe must depend upon its undertaking to restore the churches which had been destroyed, to guarantee the inviolability of Christian worship in the future, and to discriminate in its punishments between the innocent and the guilty. Presenting ultimatum from his master, Strogonoff, in accordance with his instructions, demanded a written answer within eight days. No such answer came. On the 27th of July the ambassador quitted Constantinople. War seemed to be on the point of breaking out. |
[Eastern policy of Austria.]
The capital where these events were watched with the greatest apprehension was Vienna. The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire have always been most intimately connected with those of Austria; and although the long struggle of the House of Hapsburg with Napoleon and its wars in recent times with Prussia and with Italy have made the western aspect of Austrian policy more prominent and more familiar than its eastern one, the eastern interests of the monarchy have always been at least as important in the eyes of its actual rulers. Before the year 1720 Austria, not Russia, was the great enemy of Turkey and the aggressive Power of the east of Europe. After 1780 the Emperor Joseph had united with Catherine of Russia in a plan for dividing the Sultan's dominions in Europe, and actually waged a war for this purpose. In 1795 the alliance, with the same object, had been prospectively revived by Thugut; in 1809, after the Treaty of Tilsit, Metternich had determined in the last resort to combine with Napoleon and Alexander in dismembering Turkey, if all diplomatic means should fail to prevent a joint attack on the Porte by France and Russia. But this resolution had been adopted by Metternich only as a matter of necessity, and in view of a combination which threatened to reduce Austria to the position of a vassal State. Metternich's own definite and consistent policy after 1814 was the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. His statesmanship was, as a rule, governed by fear; and his fear of Alexander was second only to his old fear of Napoleon. Times were changed since Joseph and Thugut could hope to enter upon a game of aggression with Russia upon equal terms. The Austrian army had been beaten in every battle that it had fought during nearly twenty years. Province after province had been severed from it, without, except in the Tyrol, raising a hand in its support; and when in 1821 the Minister compared Austria's actual Empire and position in Europe, won and maintained in great part by his own diplomacy, with the ruin to which a series of wars had brought it ten years before, he might well thank Heaven that international Congresses were still so much in favour with the Courts, and tremble at the clash of arms which from the remote Morea threatened to call Napoleon's northern conquerors once more into the field
[Eastern policy of England.]
England was not, like Austria, exposed to actual danger by the advance of Russia towards the ÆgÆan; but the growth of Russian power had been viewed with alarm by English politicians since 1788, when Pitt had formed a triple alliance with Prussia and Holland for the purpose of defending the Porte against the attacks of Catherine and Joseph. The interest of Great Britain in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire had not been laid down as a principle before that date, nor was it then acknowledged by the Whig party. It was asserted by Pitt from considerations relating to the European balance of power, not, as in our own times, with a direct reference to England's position in India. The course of events from 1792 to 1807 made England and Russia for awhile natural allies; but this friendship was turned into hostility by the Treaty of Tilsit; and although after a few years Alexander was again fighting for the same cause as Great Britain, and the public opinion of this country enthusiastically hailed the issue of the Moscow campaign, English statesmen never forgot the interview upon the Niemen, and never, in the brightest moments of victory, regarded Alexander without some secret misgivings. During the campaign of 1814 in France, Castlereagh's willingness to negotiate with Bonaparte was due in great part to the fear that Alexander's high-wrought resolutions would collapse before Napoleon could be thoroughly crushed, and that reaction would carry him into a worse peace than that which he then disdained.
[Fears of new period of warfare.]
[Metternich and the Greeks.]
Both at London therefore and at Vienna the rebellion of Greece was viewed by governments only as an unfortunate disturbance which was likely to excite war between Russia and its neighbours, and to imperil the peace of Europe at large. It may seem strange that the spectacle of a nation rising to assert its independence should not even have aroused the question whether its claims deserved to be considered. But to do justice at least to the English Ministers of 1821, it must be remembered how terrible, how overpowering, were the memories left by the twenty years of European war that had closed in 1815, and at how vast a cost to mankind the regeneration of Greece would have been effected, if, as then seemed probable, it had ranged the Great Powers again in arms against one another, and re-kindled the spirit of military aggression which for a whole generation had made Europe the prey of rival coalitions. It is impossible to read the letter in which Castlereagh pleaded with the Czar to sacrifice his own glory and popularity to the preservation of European peace, without perceiving in what profound earnestness the English statesman sought to avert the renewal of an epoch of conflict, and how much the apprehension of coming calamity predominated in his own mind over the mere jealousy of an extension of Russian power.
[Alexander adheres to policy of peace.]
[Capdostrias retires, Aug 1822.]
The policy of Metternich in the Eastern Question had for its object the maintenance of the existing order of things; and as it was certain that some satisfaction or other must be given to Russian pride, Metternich's counsel was that the grievances of the Czar which were specifically Russian should be clearly distinguished from questions relating to the independence of Greece; and that on the former the Porte should be recommended to agree with its adversary quickly, the good offices of Europe being employed within given limits on the Czar's behalf; so that, the Russian causes of complaint being removed, Alexander might without loss of honour leave the Greeks to be subdued, and resume the diplomatic relations with Constantinople which had been so perilously severed by Strogonoff's departure. It remained for the Czar to decide whether, as head of Russia and protector of the Christians of the East, he would solve the Eastern Question by his own sword, or whether, constant to the principle and ideal of international action to which he had devoted himself since 1815, he would commit his cause to the joint mediation of Europe, and accept such solution of the problem as his allies might attain. In the latter case it was clear that no blow would be struck on behalf of Greece. For a year or more the balance wavered; at length the note of triumph sounded in the Austrian Cabinet. Capodistrias, the representative of the Greek cause at St. Petersburg, rightly measured the force of the opposing impulses in the Czar's mind. He saw that Alexander, interested as he was in Italy and Spain, would never break with that federation of the Courts which he had himself created, nor shake off the influences of legitimism which had dominated him since the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Submitting when contention had become hopeless, and anticipating his inevitable fall by a voluntary retirement from public affairs, Capodistrias, still high in credit and reputation, quitted St. Petersburg under the form leave of absence, and withdrew to Geneva, there to await events, and to enjoy the distinction of a patriot whom love for Greece had constrained to abandon one of the most splendid positions in Europe. Grave, melancholy, and austere, as one who suffered with his country, Capodistrias remained in private life till the vanquished cause had become the victorious one, and the liberated Greek nation called him to place himself at its head.
[Extension of the Greek revolt.]
[Central Greece.]
[Fall of Ali Pasha, Feb., 1822.]
[Chalcidice.]
An international diplomatic campaign of vast activity and duration began in the year 1821, but the contest of arms was left, as Metternich desired, to the Greeks and the Turks alone. The first act of the war was the insurrection of the Morea: the second was the extension of this insurrection over parts of Continental Greece and the Archipelago, and its summary extinction by the Turk in certain districts, which in consequence remained for the future outside the area of hostilities, and so were not ultimately included in the Hellenic Kingdom. Central Greece, that is, the country lying immediately north of the Corinthian Gulf, broke into revolt a few weeks later than the Morea. The rising against the Mohammedans was distinguished by the same merciless spirit: the men were generally massacred; the women, if not killed, were for the most part sold into slavery; and when, after an interval of three years, Lord Byron came to Missolonghi, he found that a miserable band of twenty-three captive women formed the sole remnant of the Turkish population of that town. Thessaly, with some exceptions, remained passive, and its inaction was of the utmost service to the Turkish cause; for Ali Pasha in Epirus was now being besieged by the Sultan's armies, and if Thessaly had risen in the rear of these troops, they could scarcely have escaped destruction. Khurshid, the Ottoman commander conducting the siege of Janina, held firmly to his task, in spite of the danger which threatened his communications, and in spite of the circumstance that his whole household had fallen into the hands of the Moreot insurgents. His tenacity saved the border-provinces for the Ottoman Empire. No combination was effected between Ali and the Greeks, and at the beginning of 1822 the Albanian chieftain lost both his stronghold and his life. In the remoter district of Chalcidice, on the Macedonian coast, where the promontory of Athos and the two parallel peninsulas run out into the ÆgÆan, and a Greek population, clearly severed from the Slavic inhabitants of the mainland, maintained its own communal and religious organisation, the national revolt broke out under HetÆrist leaders. The monks of Mount Athos, like their neighbours, took up arms. But there was little sympathy between the privileged chiefs of these abbeys and the desperate men who had come to head the revolt. The struggle was soon abandoned; and, partly by force of arms, partly by negotiation, the authority of the Sultan was restored without much difficulty throughout this region.
[The ÆgÆan Islands.]
The settlements of the ÆgÆan which first raised the flag of Greek independence were the so-called Nautical Islands, Hydra, Spetza, and Psara, where the absence of a Turkish population and the enjoyment of a century of self-government had allowed the bold qualities of an energetic maritime race to grow to their full vigour. Hydra and Spetza were close to the Greek coast, Psara was on the farther side of the archipelago, almost within view of Asia Minor; so that in joining the insurrection its inhabitants showed great heroism, for they were exposed to the first attack of any Turkish force that could maintain itself for a few hours at sea, and the whole adjacent mainland was the recruiting-ground of the Sultan. At Hydra the revolt against the Ottoman was connected with the internal struggles of the little community, and these in their turn were connected with the great economical changes of Europe which, at the opposite end of the continent, and in a widely different society, led to the enactment of the English Corn Laws, and to the strife of classes which resulted from them. During Napoleon's wars the carrying-trade of most nations had become extinct; little corn reached England, and few besides Greek ships navigated the Euxine and Mediterranean. When peace opened the markets and the ports of all nations, just as the renewed importation of foreign corn threatened to lower the profits of English farmers and the rents of English landlords, so the reviving freedom of navigation made an end of the monopoly of the Hydriote and Psarian merchantmen. The shipowners formed an oligarchy in Hydra; the captains and crews of their ships, though they shared the profits of each voyage, were excluded from any share in the government of the island. Failure of trade, want and inactivity, hence led to a political opposition. The shipowners, wealthy and privileged men, had no inclination to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to lose, declared for Greek independence. There was a struggle in which for awhile nothing but the commonest impulses of need and rapacity came into play; but the greater cause proved its power: Hydra threw in its lot with Greece; and although private greed and ill-faith, as well as great cruelty, too often disgraced both the Hydriote crews and those of the other islands, the nucleus of a naval force was now formed which made the achievement of Greek independence possible. The three islands which led the way were soon followed by the wealthier and more populous Samos and by the greater part of the Archipelago. Crete, inhabited by a mixed Greek and Turkish population, also took up arms, and was for years to come the scene of a bloody and destructive warfare.
[The Greek leaders.]
Within the Morea the first shock of the revolt had made the Greeks masters of everything outside the fortified towns. The reduction of these places was at once undertaken by the insurgents. Tripolitza, lately the seat of the Turkish government, was the centre of operations, and in the neighbourhood of this town the first provisional government of the Greeks, called the Senate of Kaltesti, was established. Demetrius Hypsilanti, a brother of the HetÆrist leader, whose failure in Roumania was not yet known, landed in the Morea and claimed supreme power. He was tumultuously welcomed by the peasant-soldiers, though the Primates, who had hitherto held undisputed sway, bore him no good will. Two other men became prominent at this time as leaders in the Greek war of liberation. These were Maurokordatos, a descendant of the Hospodars of Wallachia-a politician superior to all his rivals in knowledge and breadth of view, but wanting in the faculty of action required by the times-and Kolokotrones, a type of the rough fighting Klepht; a mere savage in attainments, scarcely able to read or write, cunning, grossly avaricious and faithless, incapable of appreciating either military or moral discipline, but a born soldier in his own irregular way, and a hero among peasants as ignorant as himself. There was yet another, who, if his character had been equal to his station, would have been placed at the head of the government of the Morea. This was Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis, ruler of the rugged district of Maina, in the south-west of Peloponnesus, where the Turk had never established more than nominal sovereignty. A jovial, princely person, exercising among his clansmen a mild Homeric sway, Petrobei, surrounded by his nine vigorous sons, was the most picturesque figure in Greece. But he had no genius for great things. A sovereignty, which in other hands might have expanded to national dominion, remained with Petrobei a mere ornament and curiosity; and the power of the deeply-rooted clan-spirit of the Maina only made itself felt when, at a later period, the organisation of a united Hellenic State demanded its sacrifice.
[Fall of Tripolitza, Oct. 5, 1821.]
Anarchy, egotism, and ill-faith disgraced the Greek insurrection from its beginning to its close. There were, indeed, some men of unblemished honour among the leaders, and the peasantry in the ranks fought with the most determined courage year after year; but the action of most of those who figured as representatives of the people brought discredit upon the national cause. Their first successes were accompanied by gross treachery and cruelty. Had the Greek leaders been Bourbon kings, nurtured in all the sanctities of divine right, instead of tax-gatherers and cattle-lifters, truants from the wild school of Turkish violence and deceit, they could not have perjured themselves with lighter hearts. On the surrender of Navarino, in August, 1821, after a formal capitulation providing for the safety of its Turkish inhabitants, men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The capture of Tripolitza, which took place two months later, was changed from a peaceful triumph into a scene of frightful slaughter by the avarice of individual chiefs, who, while negotiations were pending, made their way into the town, and bargained with rich inhabitants to give them protection in return for their money and jewels. The soldiery, who had undergone the labours of the siege for six months, saw that their reward was being pilfered from them. Defying all orders, and in the absence of Demetrius Hypsilanti, the commander-in-chief, they rushed upon the fortifications of Tripolitza, and carried them by storm. A general massacre of the inhabitants followed. For three days the work of carnage was continued in the streets and houses, until few out of a population of many thousands remained living. According to the testimony of Kolokotrones himself, the roads were so choked with the dead, that as he rode from the gateway to the citadel his horse's hoofs never touched the ground.
[The Massacre of Chios, April-June, 1822.]
In the opening scenes of the Greek insurrection the barbarity of Christians and of Ottomans was perhaps on a level. The Greek revenged himself with the ferocity of the slave who breaks his fetters; the Turk resorted to wholesale massacre and extermination as the normal means of government in troubled times. And as experience has shown that the savagery of the European yields in one generation to the influences of civilised rule, while the Turk remains as inhuman to-day as he was under Mahmud II., so the history of 1822 proved that the most devilish passions of the Greek were in the end but a poor match for disciplined Turkish prowess in the work of butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of the Greek fleet rendering them an almost certain prey to the Sultan's troops on the mainland. The Samian leader nevertheless refused to abandon the enterprise, and laid siege to the citadel, in which there was a Turkish garrison. Before this fortress could be reduced, a relieving army of seven thousand Turks, with hosts of fanatical volunteers, landed on the island. The Samians fled; the miserable population of Chios was given up to massacre. For week after week the soldiery and the roving hordes of Ottomans slew, pillaged, and sold into slavery at their pleasure. In parts of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation more free from the vices of its type: on no community had there fallen in modern times so terrible a catastrophe. The estimates of the destruction of life at Chios are loosely framed; among the lowest is that which sets the number of the slain and the enslaved at thirty thousand. The island, lately thronging with life and activity, became a thinly-populated place. After a long period of depression and the slow return of some fraction of its former prosperity, convulsions of nature have in our own day again made Chios a ruin. A new life may arise when the Turk is no longer master of its shores, but the old history of Chios is closed for ever.
[Exploit of Kanaris, June 18th, 1822.]
The impression made upon public opinion in Europe by the massacre of 1822 was a deep and lasting one, although it caused no immediate change in the action of Governments. The general feeling of sympathy for the Greeks and hatred for the Turks, which ultimately forced the Governments to take up a different policy, was intensified by a brilliant deed of daring by which a Greek captain avenged the Chians upon their devastor, and by the unexpected success gained by the insurgents on the mainland against powerful armies of the Sultan. The Greek executive, which was now headed by Maurokordatos, had been guilty of gross neglect in not sending over the fleet in time to prevent the Turks from landing in Chios. When once this landing had been effected, the ships which afterwards arrived were powerless to prevent the massacre, and nothing could be attempted except against the Turkish fleet itself. The instrument of destruction employed by the Greeks was the fire-ship, which had been used with success against the Turk in these same waters in the war of 1770. The sacred month of the Ramazan was closing, and on the night of June 18, Kara Ali, the Turkish commander, celebrated the festival of Bairam with above a thousand men on board his flag-ship. The vessel was illuminated with coloured lanterns. In the midst of the festivities, Constantine Kanaris, a Psarian captain, brought his fire-ship unobserved right up to the Turkish man-of-war, and drove his bowsprit firmly into one of her portholes; then, after setting fire to the combustibles, he stepped quietly into a row-boat, and made away. A breeze was blowing, and in a moment the Turkish crew were enveloped in a mass of flames. The powder on board exploded; the boats were sunk; and the vessel, with its doomed crew, burned to the water-edge, its companions sheering off to save themselves from the shower of blazing fragments that fell all around. Kara Ali was killed by a broken mast; a few of his men saved their lives by swimming or were picked up by rescuers; the rest perished. Such was the consternation caused by the deed of Kanaris, that the Ottoman fleet forthwith quitted the ÆgÆan waters, and took refuge under the guns of the Dardanelles. Kanaris, unknown before, became from this exploit a famous man in Europe. It was to no stroke of fortune or mere audacity that he owed his success, but to the finest combination of nerve and nautical skill. His feat, which others were constantly attempting, but with little success, to imitate, was repeated by him in the same year. He was the most brilliant of Greek seamen, a simple and modest hero; and after his splendid achievements in the war of liberation, he served his country well in a political career. Down to his death in a hale old age, he was with justice the idol and pride of the Greek nation.
[Double invasion of Greece 1822.]
[Destruction of the Pilhellenes near Arta, July 16.]
[Unsuccessful siege of Missolonghi, Nov., 1822.]
The fall of the Albanian rebel, Ali Pasha, in the spring of 1822 made it possible for Sultan Mahmud, who had hitherto been crippled by the resistance of Janina, to throw his whole land-force against the Hellenic revolt; and the Greeks of the mainland, who had as yet had to deal only with scattered detachments or isolated garrisons, now found themselves exposed to the attack of two powerful armies. Kurshid, the conqueror of Ali Pasha, took up his headquarters at Larissa in Thessaly, and from this base the two invading armies marched southwards on diverging lines. The first, under Omer Brionis, was ordered to make its way through Southern Epirus to the western entrance of the Corinthian Gulf, and there to cross into the Morea; the second, under Dramali, to reduce Central Greece, and enter the Morea by the isthmus of Corinth; the conquest of Tripolitza and the relief of the Turkish coast-fortresses which were still uncaptured being the ultimate end to be accomplished by the two armies in combination with one another and with the Ottoman fleet. Not less than fifty thousand men were under the orders of the Turkish commanders, the division of Dramali being by far the larger of the two. Against this formidable enemy the Greeks possessed poor means of defence, nor were their prospects improved when Maurokordatos, the President, determined to take a military command, and to place himself at the head of the troops in Western Greece. There were indeed urgent reasons for striking with all possible force in this quarter. The Suliotes, after seventeen years of exile in Corfu, had returned to their mountains, and were now making common cause with Greece. They were both the military outwork of the insurrection, and the political link between the Hellenes and the Christian communities of Albania, whose action might become of decisive importance in the struggle against the Turks. Maurokordatos rightly judged the relief of Suli to be the first and most pressing duty of the Government. Under a capable leader this effort would not have been beyond the power of the Greeks; directed by a politician who knew nothing of military affairs, it was perilous in the highest degree. Maurokordatos, taking the command out of abler hands, pushed his troops forward to the neighbourhood of Arta, mismanaged everything, and after committing a most important post to Botzares, an Albanian chieftain of doubtful fidelity, left two small regiments exposed to the attack of the Turks in mass. One of these regiments, called the corps of Philhellenes, was composed of foreign officers who had volunteered to serve in the Greek cause as common soldiers. Its discipline was far superior to anything that existed among the Greeks themselves; and at its head were men who had fought in Napoleon's campaigns. But this corps, which might have become the nucleus of a regular army, was sacrificed to the incapacity of the general and the treachery of his confederate. Betrayed and abandoned by the Albanian, the Philhellenes met the attack of the Turks gallantly, and almost all perished. Maurokordatos and the remnant of the Greek troops now retired to Missolonghi. The Suliotes, left to their own resources, were once more compelled to quit their mountain home, and to take refuge in Corfu. Their resistance, however, delayed the Turks for some months, and it was not until the beginning of November that the army of Omer Brionis, after conquering the intermediate territory, appeared in front of Missolonghi. Here the presence of Maurokordatos produced a better effect than in the field. He declared that he would never leave the town as long as a man remained to fight the Turks. Defences were erected, and the besiegers kept at bay for two months. On the 6th of January, 1823, Brionis ordered an assault. It was beaten back with heavy loss; and the Ottoman commander, hopeless of maintaining his position throughout the winter, abandoned his artillery, and retired into the interior of the country.
[Dramali passes the Isthmus of Corinth, July 1822.]
[His retreat and destruction, Aug., 1822.]
In the meantime Dramali had advanced from Thessaly with twenty-four thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, the most formidable armament that had been seen in Greece since the final struggle between the Turks and Venetians in 1715. At the terror of his approach all hopes of resistance vanished. He marched through Boeotia and Attica, devastating the country, and reached the isthmus of Corinth in July, 1822. The mountain passes were abandoned by the Greeks; the Government, whose seat was at Argos, dispersed; and Dramali moved on to Nauplia, where the Turkish garrison was on the point of surrendering to the Greeks. The entrance to the Morea had been won; the very shadow of a Greek government had disappeared, and the definite suppression of the revolt seemed now to be close at hand. But two fatal errors of the enemy saved the Greek cause. Dramali neglected to garrison the passes through which he had advanced; and the commander of the Ottoman fleet, which ought to have met the land-force at Nauplia, disobeyed his instructions and sailed on to Patras. Two Greeks, at this crisis of their country's history, proved themselves equal to the call of events. Demetrius Hypsilanti, now President of the Legislature, refused to fly with his colleagues, and threw himself, with a few hundred men, into the Acropolis of Argos. Kolokotrones, hastening to Tripolitza, called out every man capable of bearing arms, and hurried back to Argos, where the Turks were still held at bay by the defenders of the citadel. Dramali could no longer think of marching into the interior of the Morea. The gallantry of Demetrius had given time for the assemblage of a considerable force, and the Ottoman general now discovered the ruinous effect of his neglect to garrison the passes in his rear. These were seized by Kolokotrones. The summer-drought threatened the Turkish army with famine; the fleet which would have rendered them independent of land-supplies was a hundred miles away; and Dramali, who had lately seen all Greece at his feet, now found himself compelled to force his way back through the enemy to the isthmus of Corinth. The measures taken by Kolokotrones to intercept his retreat were skilfully planned, and had they been adequately executed not a man of the Ottoman army would have escaped. It was only through the disorder and the cupidity of the Greeks themselves that a portion of Dramali's force succeeded in cutting its way back to Corinth. Baggage was plundered while the retreating enemy ought to have been annihilated, and divisions which ought to have co-operated in the main attack sought trifling successes of their own. But the losses and the demoralisation of the Turkish army were as ruinous to it as total destruction. Dramali himself fell ill and died; and the remnant of his troops which had escaped from the enemy's hands perished in the neighbourhood of Corinth from sickness and want.
[Greek Civil Wars, 1824.]
The decisive events of 1822 opened the eyes of European Governments to the real character of the Greek national rising, and to the probability of its ultimate success. The forces of Turkey were exhausted for the moment, and during the succeeding year no military operations could be undertaken by the Sultan on anything like the same scale. It would perhaps have been better for the Greeks themselves if the struggle had been more continuously sustained. Nothing but foreign pressure could give unity to the efforts of a race distracted by so many local rivalries, and so many personal ambitions and animosities. Scarcely was the extremity of danger passed when civil war began among the Greeks themselves. Kolokotrones set himself up in opposition to the Legislature, and seized on some of the strong places in the Morea. This first outbreak of the so-called military party against the civil authorities was, however, of no great importance. The Primates of the Morea took part with the representatives of the islands and of Central Greece against the disturber of the peace, and an accommodation was soon arranged. Konduriottes, a rich ship-owner of Hydra, was made President, with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to the highest military and civil posts. Rebellion again broke out, and Kolokotrones was joined by his old antagonists, the Primates of the Morea. A serious struggle ensued, and the government, which was really conducted by Kolettes, displayed an energy that surprised both its friends and its foes. The Morea was invaded by a powerful force from Hydra. No mercy was shown to the districts which supported the rebels. Kolokotrones was thoroughly defeated, and compelled to give himself up to the Government. He was carried to Hydra and thrown into prison, where he remained until new peril again rendered his services indispensable to Greece.
[Mahmud calls for the help of Egypt.]
After the destruction of Dramali's army and the failure of the Ottoman navy to effect any result whatever, the Sultan appears to have conceived a doubt whether the subjugation of Greece might not in fact be a task beyond his own unaided power. Even if the mainland were conquered, it was certain that the Turkish fleet could never reduce the islands, nor prevent the passage of supplies and reinforcements from these to the ports of the Morea. Strenuous as Mahmud had hitherto shown himself in crushing his vassals who, like Ali Pasha, attempted to establish an authority independent of the central government, he now found himself compelled to apply to the most dangerous of them all for assistance. Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, had risen to power in the disturbed time that followed the expulsion of Napoleon's forces from Egypt. His fleet was more powerful than that of Turkey. He had organised an army composed of Arabs, negroes, and fellahs, and had introduced into it, by means of French officers, the military system and discipline of Europe. The same reform had been attempted in Turkey seventeen years before by Mahmud's predecessor, Selim III., but it had been successfully resisted by the soldiery of Constantinople, and Selim had paid for his innovations with his life. Mahmud, silent and tenacious, had long been planning the destruction of the Janissaries, the mutinous and degraded representatives of a once irresistible force, who would now neither fight themselves nor permit their rulers to organise any more effective body of troops in their stead. It is possible that the Sultan may have believed that a victory won over the enemies of Islam by the re-modelled forces of Egypt would facilitate the execution of his own plans of military reform; it is also possible that he may not have been unwilling to see his vassal's resources dissipated by a distant and hazardous enterprise. Not without some profound conviction of the urgency of the present need, not without some sinister calculation as to the means of dealing with an eventual rival in the future, was the offer of aggrandisement-if we may judge from the whole tenor of Sultan Mahmud's career and policy-made to the Pasha of Egypt by his jealous and far-seeing master. The Pasha was invited to assume the supreme command of the Ottoman forces by land and sea, and was promised the island of Crete in return for his co-operation against the Hellenic revolt. Messages to this effect reached Alexandria at the beginning of 1824. Mehemet, whose ambition had no limits, welcomed the proposals of his sovereign with ardour, and, while declining the command for himself, accepted it on behalf of Ibrahim, his adopted son.
[Turkish-Egyptian plans.]
[Egyptians conquer Crete, April, 1824.]
[Destruction of Psara, July, 1824.]
The most vigorous preparations for war were now made at Alexandria. The army was raised to 90,000 men, and new ships were added to the navy from English dockyards. A scheme was framed for the combined operation of the Egyptian and the Turkish forces which appeared to render the ultimate conquest of Greece certain. It was agreed that the island of Crete, which is not sixty miles distant from the southern extremity of the Morea, should be occupied by Ibrahim, and employed as his place of arms; that simultaneous or joint attacks should then be made upon the principal islands of the ÆgÆan; and that after the capture of these strongholds and the destruction of the maritime resources of the Greeks, Ibrahim's troops should pass over the narrow sea between Crete and the Morea, and complete their work by the reduction of the mainland, thus left destitute of all chance of succour from without. Crete, like Sicily, is a natural stepping-stone between Europe and Africa; and when once the assistance of Egypt was invoked by the Sultan, it was obvious that Crete became the position which above all others it was necessary for the Greeks to watch and to defend. But the wretched Government of Konduriottes was occupied with its domestic struggles. The appeal of the Cretans for protection remained unanswered, and in the spring of 1824 a strong Egyptian force landed on this island, captured its fortresses, and suppressed the resistance of the inhabitants with the most frightful cruelty. The base of operations had been won, and the combined attacks of the Egyptian and Turkish fleets upon the smaller islands followed. Casos, about thirty miles east of Crete, was surprised by the Egyptians, and its population exterminated. Psara was selected for the attack of the Turkish fleet. Since the beginning of the insurrection the Psariotes had been the scourge and terror of the Ottoman coasts. The services that they had rendered in the Greek navy had been priceless; and if there was one spot of Greek soil which ought to have been protected as long as a single boat's crew remained afloat, it was the little rock of Psara. Yet, in spite of repeated warnings, the Greek Government allowed the Turkish fleet to pass the Dardanelles unobserved, and some clumsy feints were enough to blind it to the real object of an expedition whose aim was known to all Europe. There were ample means for succouring the islanders, as subsequent events proved; but when the Turkish admiral, Khosrew, with 10,000 men on board, appeared before Psara, the Greek fleet was far away. The Psariotes themselves were over-confident. They trusted to their batteries on land, and believed their rocks to be impregnable. They were soon undeceived. While a corps of Albanians scaled the cliffs behind the town, the Turks gained a footing in front, and overwhelmed their gallant enemy by weight of numbers. No mercy was asked or given. Eight thousand of the Psarians were slain or carried away as slaves. Not more than one-third of the population succeeded in escaping to the neighbouring islands.
[Greek successes off the coast of Asia Minor, September, 1824.]
[Ibrahim reaches Crete. December, 1824.]
The first part of the Turko-Egyptian plan had thus been successfully accomplished, and if Khosrew had attacked Samos immediately after his first victory, this island would probably have fallen before help could arrive. But, like other Turkish commanders, Khosrew loved intervals of repose, and he now sailed off to Mytilene to celebrate the festival of Bairam. In the meantime the catastrophe of Psara had aroused the Hydriote Government to a sense of its danger. A strong fleet was sent across the ÆgÆan, and adequate measures were taken to defend Samos both by land and sea. The Turkish fleet was attacked with some success, and though Ibrahim with the Egyptian contingent now reached the coast of Asia Minor, the Greeks proved themselves superior to their adversaries combined. The operations of the Mussulman commanders led to no result; they were harassed and terrified by the Greek fireships; and when at length all hope of a joint conquest of Samos had been abandoned, and Ibrahim set sail for Crete to carry out his own final enterprise alone, he was met on the high seas by the Greeks, and driven back to the coast of Asia Minor. During the autumn of 1824 the disasters of the preceding months were to some extent retrieved, and the situation of the Egyptian fleet would have become one of some peril if the Greeks had maintained their guard throughout the winter. But they underrated the energy of Ibrahim, and surrendered themselves to the belief that he would not repeat the attempt to reach Crete until the following spring. Careless, or deluded by false information, they returned to Hydra, and left the seas unwatched. Ibrahim saw his opportunity, and, setting sail for Crete at the beginning of December, he reached it without falling in with the enemy.
[Ibrahim in the Morea, Feb., 1825.]
The snowy heights of Taygetus are visible on a clear winter's day from the Cretan coast; yet, with their enemy actually in view of them, the Greeks neglected to guard the passage to the Morea. On the 22nd of February, 1825, Ibrahim crossed the sea unopposed and landed five thousand men at Modon. He was even able to return to Crete and bring over a second contingent of superior strength before any steps were taken to hinder his movements. The fate of the mainland was now settled. Ibrahim marched from Modon upon Navarino, defeated the Greek forces on the way, and captured the garrison placed in the Island of Sphakteria-the scene of the first famous surrender of the Spartans-before the Greek fleet could arrive to relieve it. The forts of Navarino then capitulated, and Ibrahim pushed on his victorious march towards the centre of the Morea. It was in vain that the old chief Kolokotrones was brought from his prison at Hydra to take supreme command. The conqueror of Dramali was unable to resist the onslaught of Ibrahim's regiments, recruited from the fierce races of the Soudan, and fighting with the same arms and under the same discipline as the best troops in Europe. Kolokotrones was driven back through Tripolitza, and retired as the Russians had retired from Moscow, leaving a deserted capital behind him. Ibrahim gave his troops no rest; he hurried onwards against Nauplia, and on the 24th of June reached the summit of the mountain-pass that looks down upon the Argolic Gulf. "Ah, little island," he cried, as he saw the rock of Hydra stretched below him, "how long wilt thou escape me?" At Nauplia itself the Egyptian commander rode up to the very gates and scanned the defences, which he hoped to carry at the first assault. Here, however, a check awaited him. In the midst of general flight and panic, Demetrius Hypsilanti was again the undaunted soldier. He threw himself with some few hundreds of men into the mills of Lerna, and there beat back Ibrahim's vanguard when it attempted to carry this post by storm. The Egyptian recognised that with men like these in front of him Nauplia could be reduced only by a regular siege. He retired for a while upon Tripolitza, and thence sent out his harrying columns, slaughtering and devastating in every direction. It seemed to be his design not merely to exhaust the resources of his enemy but to render the Morea a desert, and to exterminate its population. In the very birthplace of European civilisation, it was said, this savage, who had already been nominated Pasha of the Morea, intended to extinguish the European race and name, and to found for himself upon the ashes of Greece a new barbaric state composed of African negroes and fellaheen. That such design had actually been formed was denied by the Turkish government in answer to official inquiries, and its existence was not capable of proof. But the brutality of one age is the stupidity of the next, and Ibrahim's violence recoiled upon himself. Nothing in the whole struggle between the Sultan and the Greeks gave so irresistible an argument to the Philhellenes throughout Europe, or so directly overcame the scruples of Governments in regard to an armed intervention in favour of Greece, as Ibrahim's alleged policy of extermination and re-settlement. The days were past when Europe could permit its weakest member to be torn from it and added to the Mohammedan world.
[Siege of Missolongi, April, 1825-April, 1826.]
One episode of the deepest tragic interest yet remained in the Turko-Hellenic conflict before the Powers of Europe stepped in and struck with weapons stronger than those which had fallen from dying hands. The town of Missolonghi was now beleaguered by the Turks, who had invaded Western Greece while Ibrahim was overrunning the Morea. Missolonghi had already once been besieged without success; and, as in the case of Saragossa, the first deliverance appears to have inspired the townspeople with the resolution, maintained even more heroically at Missolonghi than at the Spanish city, to die rather than capitulate. From the time when Reschid, the Turkish commander, opened the second attack by land and sea in the spring of 1825, the garrison and the inhabitants met every movement of the enemy with the most obstinate resistance. It was in vain that Reschid broke through the defences with his artillery, and threw mass after mass upon the breaches which he made. For month after month the assaults of the Turks were uniformly repelled, until at length the arrival of a Hydriote squadron forced the Turkish fleet to retire from its position, and made the situation of Reschid himself one of considerable danger. And now, as winter approached, and the guerilla bands in the rear of the besiegers grew more and more active, the Egyptian army with its leader was called from the Morea to carry out the task in which the Turks had failed. The Hydriote sea-captains had departed, believing their presence to be no longer needed; and although they subsequently returned for a short time, their services were grudgingly rendered and ineffective. Ibrahim, settling down to his work at the beginning of 1826, conducted his operations with the utmost vigour, boasting that he would accomplish in fourteen days what the Turks could not effect in nine months. But his veteran soldiers were thoroughly defeated when they met the Greeks hand to hand; and the Egyptian, furious with his enemy, his allies, and his own officers, confessed that Missolonghi could only be taken by blockade. He now ordered a fleet of flat-bottomed boats to be constructed and launched upon the lagoons that lie between Missolonghi and the open sea. Missolonghi was thus completely surrounded; and when the Greek admirals appeared for the last time and endeavoured to force an entrance through the shallows, they found the besieger in full command of waters inaccessible to themselves, and after one unsuccessful effort abandoned Missolonghi to its fate. In the third week of April, 1826, exactly a year after the commencement of the siege, the supply of food was exhausted. The resolution, long made, that the entire population, men, women, and children, should fall by the enemy's sword rather than surrender, was now actually carried out. On the night of the 22nd of April all the Missolonghiots, with the exception of those whom age, exhaustion, or illness made unable to leave their homes, were drawn up in bands at the city gates, the women armed and dressed as men, the children carrying pistols. Preceded by a body of soldiers, they crossed the moat under Turkish fire. The attack of the vanguard carried everything before it, and a way was cut through the Turkish lines. But at this moment some cry of confusion was mistaken by those who were still on the bridges for an order to retreat. A portion of the non-combatants returned into the town, and with them the rearguard of the military escort. The leading divisions, however, continued their march forward, and would have escaped with the loss of some of the women and children, had not treachery already made the Turkish commander acquainted with the routes which they intended to follow. They had cleared the Turkish camp, and were expecting to meet the bands of Greek armatoli, who had promised to fall upon the enemy's rear, when, instead of friends, they encountered troop after troop of Ottoman cavalry and of Albanians placed in ambush along the road between Missolonghi and the mountains. Here, exhausted and surprised, they were cut down without mercy, and out of a body numbering several thousand not more than fifteen hundred men, with a few women and children, ultimately reached places of safety. Missolonghi itself was entered by the Turks during the sortie. The soldiers who had fallen back during the confusion on the bridges, proved that they had not acted from cowardice. They fought unflinchingly to the last, and three bands, establishing themselves in the three powder magazines of the town, set fire to them when surrounded by the Turks, and perished in the explosion Some thousands of women and children were captured around and within the town, or wandering on the mountains; but the Turks had few other prisoners. The men were dead or free.
[Fall of the Acropolis of Athens, June 5, 1827.]
From Missolonghi the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled eastward, and the Acropolis of Athens was in its turn the object of a long and arduous siege. The Government, which now held scarcely any territory on the mainland except Nauplia, where it was itself threatened by Ibrahim, made the most vigorous efforts to prevent the Acropolis from falling into Reschid's hands. All, however, was in vain. The English officers, Church and Cochrane, who were now placed at the head of the military and naval forces of Greece, failed ignominiously in the attacks which they made on Reschid's besieging army; and the garrison capitulated on June 5, 1827. But the time was past when the liberation of Greece could be prevented by any Ottoman victory. The heroic defence of the Missolonghiots had achieved its end. Greece had fought long enough to enlist the Powers of Europe on its side; and in the same month that Missolonghi fell the policy of non-intervention was definitely abandoned by those Governments which were best able to carry their intentions into effect. If the struggle had ended during the first three years of the insurrection, no hand would have been raised to prevent the restoration of the Sultan's rule. Russia then lay as if spell-bound beneath the diplomacy of the Holy Alliance; and although in the second year of the war the death of Castlereagh and the accession of Canning to power had given Greece a powerful friend instead of a powerful foe within the British Ministry, it was long before England stirred from its neutrality. Canning indeed made no secret of his sympathies for Greece, and of his desire to give the weaker belligerent such help as a neutral might afford; but when he took up office the time had not come when intervention would have been useful or possible. Changes in the policy of other great Powers and in the situation of the belligerents themselves were, he considered, necessary before the influence of England could be successfully employed in establishing peace in the East.
[First Russian project of joint intervention, 12 Jan., 1824.]
A vigorous movement of public opinion in favour of Greece made itself felt throughout Western Europe as the struggle continued; and the vivid and romantic interest excited over the whole civilised world by the death of Lord Byron in 1823, among the people whom he had come to free, probably served the Greek cause better than all that Byron could have achieved had his life been prolonged. In France and England, where public opinion had great influence on the action of the Government, as well as in Germany, where it had none whatever, societies were formed for assisting the Greeks with arms, stores, and money. The first proposal, however, for a joint intervention in favour of Greece came from St. Petersburg. The undisguised good-will of Canning towards the insurgents led the Czar's Government to anticipate that England itself might soon assume that championship of the Greek cause which Russia, at the bidding of Metternich and of Canning's predecessor, had up to that time declined. If the Greeks were to be befriended, it was intolerable that others should play the part of the patron. Accordingly, on the 12th of January, 1824, a note was submitted in the Czar's name to all the Courts of Europe, containing a plan for a settlement of the Greek question, which it was proposed that the great Powers of Europe should enforce upon Turkey either by means of an armed demonstration or by the threat of breaking off all diplomatic relations. According to this scheme, Greece, apart from the islands, was to be divided into three Principalities, each tributary to the Sultan and garrisoned by Turkish troops, but in other respects autonomous, like the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The islands were to retain their municipal organisation as before. In one respect this scheme was superior to all that have succeeded it, for it included in the territory of the Greeks both Crete and Epirus; in all other respects it was framed in the interest of Russia alone. Its object was simply to create a second group of provinces, like those on the Danube, which should afford Russia a constant opportunity for interfering with the Ottoman Empire, and which at the same time should prevent the Greeks from establishing an independent and self-supporting State. The design cannot be called insidious, for its object was so palpable that not a single politician in Europe was deceived by it; and a very simple ruse of Metternich's was enough to draw from the Russian Government an explicit declaration against the independence of Greece, which was described by the Czar as a mere chimera. But of all the parties concerned, the Greeks themselves were loudest in denounciation of the Russian plan. Their Government sent a protest against it to London, and was assured by Canning in reply that the support of this country should never be given to any scheme for disposing of the Greeks without their own consent. Elsewhere the Czar's note was received with expressions of politeness due to a Court which it might be dangerous to contradict; and a series of conferences was opened at St. Petersburg for the purpose of discussing propositions which no one intended to carry into execution. Though Canning ordered the British ambassador at St. Petersburg to dissociate himself from these proceedings, the conferences dragged on, with long adjournments, from the spring of 1824 to the summer of the following year.
[Discontent and conspiracies in Russia.]
In the meantime a strong spirit of discontent was rising in the Russian army and nation. The religious feeling no less than the pride of the people was deeply wounded by Alexander's refusal to aid the Greeks in their struggle, and by the pitiful results of his attempted diplomatic concert. Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy with it to the spell of classical literature and art. It is characteristic of the strength of the religious element in the political views of the Russian people, that the floods of the Neva which overwhelmed St. Petersburg in the winter of 1825 should have been regarded as a sign of divine anger at the Czar's inaction in the struggle between the Crescent and the Cross. But other causes of discontent were not wanting in Russia. Though Alexander had forgotten his promises to introduce constitutional rule, there were many, especially in the army, who had not done so. Officers who served in the invasion of France in 1815, and in the three years' occupation which followed it, returned from Western Europe with ideas of social progress and of constitutional rights which they could never have gathered in their own country. And when the bright hopes which had been excited by the recognition of these same ideas by the Czar passed away, and Russia settled down into the routine of despotism and corruption, the old unquestioning loyalty of the army was no longer proof against the workings of the revolutionary spirit. In a land where legal means of opposition to government and of the initiation of reform were wholly wanting, discontent was forced into its most dangerous form, that of military conspiracy. The army was honeycombed with secret societies. Both in the north and in the south of Russia men of influence worked among the younger officers, and gained a strong body of adherents to their design of establishing a constitution by force. The southern army contained the most resolute and daring conspirators. These men had definitely abandoned the hope of effecting any public reform as long as Alexander lived, and they determined to sacrifice the sovereign, as his father and others before him had been sacrificed, to the political necessities of the time. If the evidence subsequently given by those implicated in the conspiracy is worthy of credit, a definite plan had been formed for the assassination of the Czar in the presence of his troops at one of the great reviews intended to be held in the south of Russia in the autumn of 1825. On the death of the monarch a provisional government was at once to be established, and a constitution proclaimed.
[Death of the Czar, Dec. 1, 1825.]
Alexander, aware of the rising indignation of his people, and irritated beyond endurance by the failure of his diplomatic efforts, had dissolved the St. Petersburg Conferences in August, 1825, and declared that Russia would henceforth act according to its own discretion. He quitted St. Petersburg and travelled to the Black Sea, accompanied by some of the leaders of the war-party. Here, plunged in a profound melancholy, conscious that all his early hopes had only served to surround him with conspirators, and that his sacrifice of Russia's military interests to international peace had only rendered his country impotent before all Europe, he still hesitated to make the final determination between peace and war. A certain mystery hung over his movements, his acts, and his intentions. Suddenly, while all Europe waited for the signal that should end the interval of suspense, the news was sent out from a lonely port on the Black Sea that the Czar was dead. Alexander, still under fifty years of age, had welcomed the illness which carried him from a world of cares, and closed a career in which anguish and disappointment had succeeded to such intoxicating glory and such unbounded hope. Young as he still was for one who had reigned twenty-four years, Alexander was of all men the most life-weary. Power, pleasure, excitement, had lavished on him hours of such existence as none but Napoleon among all his contemporaries had enjoyed. They had left him nothing but the solace of religious resignation, and the belief that a Power higher than his own might yet fulfil the purposes in which he himself had failed. Ever in the midst of great acts and great events, he had missed greatness himself. Where he had been best was exactly where men inferior to himself considered him to have been worst-in his hopes; and these hopes he had himself abandoned and renounced. Strength, insight, unity of purpose, the qualities which enable men to mould events, appeared in him but momentarily or in semblance. For want of them the large and fair horizon of his earlier years was first obscured and then wholly blotted out from his view, till in the end nothing but his pietism and his generosity distinguished him from the politicians of repression whose instrument he had become.
[Military insurrection at St. Petersburg, Dec 26, 1825.]
The sudden death of Alexander threw the Russian Court into the greatest confusion, for it was not known who was to succeed him. The heir to the throne was his brother Constantine, an ignorant and brutal savage, who had just sufficient sense not to desire to be Czar of Russia, though he considered himself good enough to tyrannise over the Poles. Constantine had renounced his right to the crown some years before, but the renunciation had not been made public, nor had the Grand Duke Nicholas, Constantine's younger brother, been made aware that the succession was irrevocably fixed upon himself. Accordingly, when the news of Alexander's death reached St. Petersburg, and the document embodying Constantine's abdication was brought from the archives by the officials to whose keeping it had been entrusted, Nicholas refused to acknowledge it as binding, and caused the troops to take the oath of allegiance to Constantine, who was then at Warsaw. Constantine, on the other hand, proclaimed his brother emperor. An interregnum of three weeks followed, during which messages passed between Warsaw and St. Petersburg, Nicholas positively refusing to accept the crown unless by his elder brother's direct command. This at length arrived, and on the 26th of December Nicholas assumed the rank of sovereign. But the interval of uncertainty had been turned to good account by the conspirators at St. Petersburg. The oath already taken by the soldiers to Constantine enabled the officers who were concerned in the plot to denounce Nicholas as a usurper, and to disguise their real designs under the cloak of loyalty to the legitimate Czar. Ignorant of the very meaning of a constitution, the common soldiers mutinied because they were told to do so; and it is said that they shouted the word Constitution, believing it to be the name of Constantine's wife. When summoned to take the oath to Nicholas, the Moscow Regiment refused it, and marched off to the place in front of the Senate House, where it formed square, and repulsed an attack made upon it by the Cavalry of the Guard. Companies from other regiments now joined the mutineers, and symptoms of insurrection began to show themselves among the civil population. Nicholas himself did not display the energy of character which distinguished him through all his later life; on the contrary, his attitude was for some time rather that of resignation than of self-confidence. Whether some doubt as to the justice of his cause haunted him, or a trial like that to which he was now exposed was necessary to bring to its full strength the iron quality of his nature, it is certain that the conduct of the new Czar during these critical hours gave to those around him little indication of the indomitable will which was hence forth to govern Russia. Though the great mass of the army remained obedient, it was but slowly brought up to the scene of revolt. Officers of high rank were sent to harangue the insurgents, and one of these, General Miloradovitsch, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, was mortally wounded while endeavouring to make himself heard. It was not until evening that the artillery was ordered into action, and the command given by the Czar to fire grape-shot among the insurgents. The effect was decisive. The mutineers fled before a fire which they were unable to return, and within a few minutes the insurrection was over. It had possessed no chief of any military capacity; its leaders were missing at the moment when a forward march or an attack on the palace of the Czar might have given them the victory; and among the soldiers at large there was not the least desire to take part in any movement against the established system of Russia. The only effect left by the conspiracy within Russia itself was seen in the rigorous and uncompromising severity with which Nicholas henceforward enforced the principle of autocratic rule. The illusions of the previous reign were at an end. A man with the education and the ideas of a drill-sergeant and the religious assurance of a Covenanter was on the throne; rebellion had done its worst against him; and woe to those who in future should deviate a hair's breadth from their duty of implicit obedience to the sovereign's all-sufficing power.
[Anglo-Russian Protocol, April 4, 1826.]
It has been stated, and with some probability of truth, that the military insurrection of 1825 disposed the new Czar to a more vigorous policy abroad. The conspirators, when on their trial, declared it to have been their intention to throw the army at once into an attack upon the Turks; and in so doing they would certainly have had the feeling of the nation on their side. Nicholas himself had little or no sympathy for the Greeks. They were a democratic people, and the freedom which they sought to gain was nothing but anarchy. "Do not speak of the Greeks," he said to the representative of a foreign power, "I call them the rebels." Nevertheless, little as Nicholas wished to serve the Greek democracy, both inclination and policy urged him to make an end of his predecessor's faint-hearted system of negotiation, and to bring the struggle in the East to a summary close. Canning had already, in conversation with the Russian ambassador at London, discussed a possible change of policy on the part of the two rival Courts. He now saw that time had come for establishing new relations between Great Britain and Russia, and for attempting that co-operation in the East which he had held to be impracticable during Alexander's reign. The Duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg, nominally to offer the usual congratulations to the new sovereign, in reality to dissuade him from going to war, and to propose either the separate intervention of England or a joint intervention by England and Russia on behalf of Greece. The mission was successful. It was in vain that Metternich endeavoured to entangle the new Czar in the diplomatic web that had so long held his predecessor. The spell of the Holy Alliance was broken. Nicholas looked on the past influence of Austria on the Eastern Question only with resentment; he would hear of no more conferences of ambassadors; and on the 4th of April, 1826, a Protocol was signed at St. Petersburg, by which Great Britain and Russia fixed the conditions under which the mediation of the former Power was to be tendered to the Porte. Greece was to remain tributary to the Sultan; it was, however, to be governed by its own elected authorities, and to be completely independent in its commercial relations. The policy known in our own day as that of bag-and-baggage expulsion was to be carried out in a far more extended sense than that in which it has been advocated by more recent champions of the subject races of the East; the Protocol of 1826 stipulating for the removal not only of Turkish officials but of the entire surviving Turkish population of Greece. All property belonging to the Turks, whether on the continent or in the islands, was to be purchased by the Greeks.
Thus was the first step taken in the negotiations which ended in the establishment of Hellenic independence. The Protocol, which had been secretly signed, was submitted after some interval to the other Courts of Europe. At Vienna it was received with the utmost disgust. Metternich had at first declared the union of England and Russia to be an impossibility. When this union was actually established, no language was sufficiently strong to express his mortification and his spite. At one moment he declared that Canning was a revolutionist who had entrapped the young and inexperienced Czar into an alliance with European radicalism; at another, that England had made itself the cat's-paw of Russian ambition. Not till now, he protested, could Europe understand what it had lost in Castlereagh. Nor did Metternich confine himself to lamentations. While his representatives at Paris and Berlin spared no effort to excite the suspicion of those Courts against the Anglo-Russian project of intervention, the Austrian ambassador at London worked upon King George's personal hostility to Canning, and conspired against the Minister with that important section of the English aristocracy which was still influenced by the traditional regard for Austria. Berlin, however, was the only field where Metternich's diplomacy still held its own. King Frederick William had not yet had time to acquire the habit of submission to the young Czar Nicholas, and was therefore saved the pain of deciding which of two masters he should obey. In spite of his own sympathy for the Greeks, he declined to connect Prussia with the proposed joint-intervention, and remained passive, justifying this course by the absence of any material interests of Prussia in the East. Being neither a neighbour of the Ottoman Empire nor a maritime Power, Prussia had in fact no direct means of making its influence felt.
[Treaty between England, Russia and France, July, 1827.]
France, on whose action much more depended, was now governed wholly in the interests of the Legitimist party. Louis XVIII. had died in 1824, and the Count of Artois had succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles X. The principles of the Legitimists would logically have made them defenders of the hereditary rights of the Sultan against his rebellious subjects; but the Sultan, unlike Ferdinand of Spain, was not a Bourbon nor even a Christian; and in a case where the legitimate prince was an infidel and the rebels were Christians, the conscience of the most pious Legitimist might well recoil from the perilous task of deciding between the divine rights of the Crown and the divine rights of the Church, and choose, in so painful an emergency, the simpler course of gratifying the national love of action. There existed, both among Liberals and among Ultramontanes, a real sympathy for Greece, and this interest was almost the only one in which all French political sections felt that they had something in common. Liberals rejoiced in the prospect of making a new free State in Europe; Catholics, like Charles X. himself, remembered Saint Louis and the Crusades; diplomatists understood the extreme importance of the impending breach between Austria and Russia, and of the opportunity of allying France with the latter Power. Thus the natural and disinterested impulse of the greater part of the public coincided exactly with the dictates of a far-seeing policy; and the Government, in spite of its Legitimist principles and of some assurances given to Metternich in person when he visited Paris in 1825, determined to accept the policy of the Anglo-Russian intervention in the East, and to participate in the active measures about to be taken by the two Powers. The Protocol of St. Petersburg formed the basis of a definitive treaty which was signed at London in July, 1827. By this act England, Russia, and France undertook to put an end to the conflict in the East, which, through the injury done to the commerce of all nations, had become a matter of European concern. The contending parties were to be summoned to accept the mediation of the Powers and to consent to an armistice. Greece was to be made autonomous, under the paramount sovereignty of the Sultan; the Mohammedan population of the Greek provinces was, as in the Protocol of St. Petersburg, to be entirely removed; and the Greeks were to enter upon possession of all Turkish property within their limits, paying an indemnity to the former owners. Each of the three contracting Governments pledged itself to seek no increase of territory in the East, and no special commercial advantages. In the secret articles of the treaty provisions were made for the case of the rejection by the Turks of the proposed offer of mediation. Should the armistice not be granted within one month, the Powers agreed that they would announce to each belligerent their intention to prevent further encounters, and that they would take the necessary steps for enforcing this declaration, without, however, taking part in hostilities themselves. Instructions in conformity with the Treaty were to be sent to the Admirals commanding the Mediterranean squadrons of the three Powers.
[Death of Canning, August, 1827.]
[Policy of Canning.]
Scarcely was the Treaty of London signed when Canning died. He had definitely broken from the policy of his predecessors, that policy which, for the sake of guarding against Russia's advance, had condemned the Christian races of the East to 1827. eternal subjection to the Turk, and bound up Great Britain with the Austrian system of resistance to the very principle and name of national independence. Canning was no blind friend to Russia. As keenly as any of his adversaries he appreciated the importance of England's interests in the East; of all English statesmen of that time he would have been the last to submit to any diminution of England's just influence or power. But, unlike his predecessors, he saw that there were great forces at work which, whether with England's concurrence or in spite of it, would accomplish that revolution in the East for which the time was now come; and he was statesman enough not to acquiesce in the belief that the welfare of England was in permanent and necessary antagonism to the moral interests of mankind and the better spirit of the age. Therefore, instead of attempting to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or holding aloof and resorting to threats and armaments while Russia accomplished the liberation of Greece by itself, he united with Russia in this work, and relied on concerted action as the best preventive against the undue extension of Russia's influence in the East. In committing England to armed intervention, Canning no doubt hoped that the settlement of the Greek question arranged by the Powers would be peacefully accepted by the Sultan, and that a separate war between Russia and the Porte, on this or any other issue, would be averted. Neither of these hopes was realised. The joint-intervention had to be enforced by arms, and no sooner had the Allies struck their common blow than a war between Turkey and Russia followed. How far the course of events might have been modified had Canning's life not been cut short it is impossible to say; but whether his statesmanship might or might not have averted war on the Danube, the balance of results proved his policy to have been the right one. Greece was established as an independent State, to supply in the future a valuable element of resistance to Slavic preponderance in the Levant; and the encounter between Russia and Turkey, so long dreaded, produced none of those disastrous effects which had been anticipated from it. On the relative value of Canning's statesmanship as compared with that of his predecessors, the mind of England and of Europe has long been made up. He stands among those who have given to this country its claim to the respect of mankind. His monument, as well as his justification, is the existence of national freedom in the East; and when half a century later a British Government reverted to the principle of nonintervention, as it had been understood by Castlereagh, and declined to enter into any effective co-operation with Russia for the emancipation of Bulgaria, even then, when the precedent of Canning's action in 1827 stood in direct and glaring contradiction to the policy of the hour, no effective attempt was made by the leaders of the party to which Canning had belonged to impugn his authority, or to explain away his example. It might indeed be alleged that Canning had not explicitly resolved on the application of force; but those who could maintain that Canning would, like Wellington, have used the language of apology and regret when Turkish obstinacy had made it impossible to effect the object of his intervention by any other means, had indeed read the history of Canning's career in vain.
