In the Peloponnese, during the winter of 1820–1, both Greeks and Turks lived in an uneasy atmosphere compounded of expectation and apprehension. It was said to be like calm before a storm, or dry tinder awaiting a spark, or perhaps most aptly in Finlay’s words, ‘Each party seemed to be waiting for a signal from a distance, and the winter was passed in anxiety and hope.’1
The landscape of the Peloponnese is largely mountainous, with limited fertile plains, and communication and transport easier by sea than by land. Well-established harbours had therefore become the main centres of population, and were the sites of a chain of major fortresses built or extended by the Venetians, possession of which was seen by both Greeks and Turks as the key to control of the Peloponnese. These were at Patras and the nearby Castle of the Morea, modern Río, with its twin the Castle of Roumeli, modern Antírio, just across the Gulf of Corinth; and, reading clockwise, the Akrokórinthos above the town of Corinth; the fortress of Palamídhi at Navplion overlooking one of the best harbours in the Peloponnese, and its near neighbour at Árgos; the great fortified rock at Monemvasía in the south-east; Koróni and Methóni on the tip of the south-western promontory of the Peloponnese; and two castles at Navarino by the modern town of Pílos, Old Navarino on a cliff top away from the town and New Navarino immediately above the town itself. A further stronghold was the walled town of Tripolis in the centre of the Peloponnese, which was the seat of Ottoman government.
There were only two routes by which a Turkish overland army could enter the Peloponnese. One was in the north-east across the Corinth isthmus, an unbroken land bridge, and from there the road south led through a narrow pass, the Dhervenákia, which was later the scene of a crushing defeat of the Turks by the Greeks. The other route into the Peloponnese was in the north-west at the narrowest part of the Gulf of Corinth. This involved a short sea crossing some twenty miles east of Mesolongi from the Castle of Roumeli to the Castle of the Morea, with a landfall about five miles east of Patras.
The government of the Peloponnese was unusual in the autonomy it allowed to one of its provinces, the Mani. The inner Mani comprises the last twenty miles or so of the central promontory of the Peloponnese, while the outer Mani extends to Yíthion on the east side and almost to Kalamáta on the west. The inner Mani especially is rocky, barren and spectacular; ‘No prospect’, says Gordon, ‘can be more dismal than that of the Laconian coast about Cape Taenarus (or Matapan); stormy waves chafing against huge masses of rock, bare and pointed mountains separated by deep chasms, rudely constructed towers surrounded by miserable hamlets, and a squalid and half-naked population.’2 The modern traveller still finds the landscape dotted with the forbidding towers in which feuding Maniots would take shelter from their enemies, sometimes for years. The inhabitants had always been ferociously warlike. In 1600 a French visitor, Castella, reported that ‘These mountain dwellers are so laden with weapons that they look like hedgehogs,’ and a century later the Venetian governor of the area commented that ‘their past successes make them disposed to uprisings and they want to keep their privileges immutable’.3
These privileges were increased as a result of the revolt of 1770, inspired by Russia through Count Gregory Orlov and centred on the Mani. The Greeks were abandoned by their Russian instigators, and the Turks used Albanian mercenaries, many of whom later settled in the region, in a ferocious suppression of the rising. Six years later jurisdiction over the Mani was transferred from the pasha of the Morea, governor till now of the whole Peloponnese, to the kapitan pasha, head of the Turkish army as well as the navy and overlord of the islands of the Aegean, one of which the Mani was now in a sense deemed to be. The kapitan pasha delegated his responsibility for order and for tax collection in the Mani to a representative of one of the leading local families as bey of the Mani, following the regular Ottoman practice of devolving power, especially in difficult areas, to the local level. Under their local beys the Mani began to enjoy increased prosperity in an era characterised as the golden age of Mani. The eighth bey since 1776, appointed in 1815, was Petrobey Mavromichális.
Petrobey was in some ways an unlikely figure to find among the leaders of the rising in 1821. There are contemporary descriptions which portray him as an avuncular patriarch. Finlay writes of ‘his frank, joyous disposition’, and Gordon describes him as ‘a very handsome man, dignified in his deportment, mild in his manners, fond of the pleasures of the table, lavish in his expenditure, and therefore always pinched for money … fitted by nature rather to indulge in opulent ease than to take part in a revolutionary tempest’. But Finlay also presents another side to Petrobey, as ‘restless, vain, bold, and ambitious … more prompt to form courageous resolutions than most of his countrymen in high station’,4 and enjoying great personal influence through his extended family, of whom no fewer than forty-nine fell in battle during the revolution. In its first years Petrobey was one of the main figures to be reckoned with by the Ottoman government and by his Greek colleagues.
The turn of the year from 1820 to 1821 saw one significant departure from the Peloponnese and two important arrivals. The departure was that of Khurshid, pasha of the Morea, who was transferred to Iánnina to take command of operations against Ali Pasha, and left the Peloponnese in mid-January 1821. Appointed only in the previous November, Khurshid had not had time to establish a policy or even fully to assess the situation in his area of command, which despatches from his superiors told him was potentially explosive and the Greeks assured him was calm apart from a few troublemaking agents of Ali Pasha. Khurshid left behind as acting governor of the Peloponnese his deputy Mehmed Salik, characterised by Finlay as ‘a young man of an arrogant disposition and no military experience’.5 It was not until late April that Mustafa Bey arrived as lieutenant-governor of the Morea. There was thus a slackening of the reins of Ottoman control of the Peloponnese in the crucial months before and just after rebellion broke out.
The arrivals in the Peloponnese during the winter of 1820–1 were of two Greeks: Theódhoros Kolokotrónis and Grigórios Dhikéos, commonly called Papaphléssas, both members of the Philikí Etería since 1818. Kolokotrónis above all others personifies the revolution for Greece. Statues of him mark his victories and ballads commemorate his achievements. An Athens street – unfortunately now one of the seedier ones – bears his name. His face, from the lithograph by Hanfstaengl, gazes sombrely from the 5,000 drachma banknote. He was 50 years old in 1821 when he came to the Peloponnese, where his youth had been spent in brigand warfare, and to which he was returning after years of service as a mercenary in the Ionian islands under the successive Russian, French and British occupiers. ‘It would be impossible’, wrote Gordon, ‘for a painter or a novelist to trace a more romantic delineation of a robber chieftain, than the figure of Colocotroni presented; tall and athletic, with a profusion of black hair and expressive features, alternately lighted up with boisterous gaiety, or darkened by bursts of passion: among his soldiers, he seemed born to command, having just the manners and bearing calculated to gain their confidence.’6 Kolokotrónis had no doubt of his own abilities: ‘If Wellington had given me an army of forty thousand,’ he wrote, ‘I could have governed it, but if five hundred Greeks had been given to him to lead, he could not have governed them for an hour.’7
In mid-January 1821, within a day or two of Khurshid’s departure from the Peloponnese, Kolokotrónis arrived there from Zákinthos. According to his own memoirs, he came to the Peloponnese with a clear plan of action in mind which he immediately set about putting into effect. He wrote to the various and often antagonistic families of the Mani; he sent messages to the common people throughout central and southern Peloponnese to be ready to rise in revolt; he instructed that all the fortresses should be besieged simultaneously; and he fixed the day of the rising as 25 March (Old Style), the feast of the Evangelismós or Annunciation, thus linking the revolutionary with the Biblical announcement.
Kolokotrónis came to the struggle as a warrior, whereas the contribution of the other arrival in the Peloponnese, Papaphléssas, was that of a firebrand orator. He was in his early thirties and was the youngest of his father’s twenty-eight children, thus offering an interesting case-study to those who link aggressive characteristics to intense sibling rivalry. After an education at the famous school in Dhimitsána, he became a monk and later an archimandrite (roughly equivalent to a dean). In October 1820 Papaphléssas was a member of the gathering at Izmail near the Wallachian border, from which Alexander Ipsilántis issued his first revolutionary proclamation. Moving on to Kidhoniés, on the west coast of Turkey, he organised a shipment of powder, lead and other war materials for the Mani. Crossing the Aegean he tried to inspire the leading families of Hydra and Spétses to revolt, but met opposition from the cautious and conservative elements. When, to counter the Hydriots’ fear of the Turkish fleet, he told them that he would sink it in its harbour at Constantinople, they asked him drily to let them know when he had done so. It is not surprising that his preaching did not appeal to the unconverted. His style was threatening and insistent rather than persuasive, and a letter from him to Xánthos is typical: ‘We need action! Talk is not work, and you do not become a man by sitting in clubs or by warming yourself at a stove. I say these things emphatically, since so much time has been wasted. The fault is yours. Finally, if the skies are dark now, they may be darker still in the future.’8 Breathing such fiery and hectoring oratory, and following Kolokotrónis in naming the Feast of the Annunciation as the date of the rising, Papaphléssas reached the Peloponnese in December 1820.
There was now a clear and urgent need for some co-ordination of all these various initiatives. It was no longer sufficient to rely on individual attempts by captains such as Kolokotrónis to unify the armed bands, on personal arrangements like those of Papaphléssas for assembling war supplies, and on the generalised preaching of revolt by members of the Etería. In particular, the political and church leaders in the Peloponnese needed to establish how far they could trust Papaphléssas and his grandiose proposals. In late January 1821 therefore they assembled for a meeting to discuss what was to be done. Four bishops attended, of whom the most influential was Bishop Yermanós of Old Patras, along with other clerics. Among the political leaders were Andréas Lóndos and the brothers Asimákis and Andréas Zaímis, and the two Andréases later played a significant part in the war of independence. Photákos, adjutant to Kolokotrónis and future biographer of Papaphléssas, was there, as was Papaphléssas himself, who brought with him two supporters, one of them his brother Nikítas, all three of them carrying weapons.
The place chosen for the meeting was Vostítsa, ancient Aegeum and modern Éyio, some twenty miles east of Patras on the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, and the pretext for it was the resolution of a long-standing boundary dispute between two local monasteries. The dominant figure at the meeting was Bishop Yermanós. Born fifty years before in Dhimitsána, and educated there, he had risen rapidly in the church hierarchy and was a personal friend of the current patriarch Grigórios. Appointed to the see of Old Patras in 1806, he had influence, it was said, throughout the Peloponnese, Roumeli and the islands, and had been an important figure in the Philikí Etería since 1818. He regarded Papaphléssas as an unmitigated rogue and charlatan, describing him in his memoirs as ‘a cheat and rotten through and through, thinking of nothing else but how to stir up trouble among the people so as to enrich himself by plunder’.9 No wonder that Papaphléssas and his companions carried weapons.
The meeting spread over four days and Yermanós took immediate control of the agenda by posing a string of highly pertinent questions:
–Is the whole Greek nation willing to rise in revolt, and will it follow our lead?
–What are the absolute necessities for the struggle? What do we need, what have we got, and where is the rest to come from?
–How and when should the rising begin? Should our attacks be simultaneous or one after another?
–Is a foreign power [meaning Russia] ready to help us? What form will any promised support take, and how firm is the promise?
–If any foreign power opposes us, what do we do?
–Who will lead the revolution in other parts of Greece?
–Should Greeks in Europe, especially the educated ones, join the struggle?
–If we fail to seize power, what then?
–If the Turks learn of our plans in advance, what action do we take?
Faced with these searching questions, Papaphléssas blustered, threatening to start the revolution himself with a band of a thousand men from the Mani and another thousand from elsewhere, and warning that the Turks would then kill anyone who was not armed. He had some success only in answering a question not on Yermanós’ list but posed by another delegate, Sotíris Charalámvis, who, pressing his palms together and raising them before his face in the Turkish manner, asked slily: once the Turks were removed, to whom would power pass? Would it be to that crude fellow (pointing to Papaphléssas’ brother Nikítas), who had only just learnt to use a fork when eating? No, said Papaphléssas; when Charalámvis’ local bey had gone, Charalámvis would take his place, and he proceeded through a list of prominent Turks distributing their offices among those present.10 Charalámvis had in fact put his finger on the question – who takes over power from the Turks? – which was to bedevil the Greek enterprise and lead ultimately to civil war between rival factions.
The consensus of those at the meeting, as summarised by Yermanós, was clearly for caution. Most Greeks, they thought, still had no idea about the coming struggle. After the experience of the failed Orlov revolt fifty years before, to start the revolution in the Peloponnese without reliable support would be madness. The attitude of the European powers, especially Russia, was unknown, and virtually all supplies needed to make war were lacking. The conclusion was inescapable: the time was not yet ripe for revolution. Some practical decisions flowed from this, mainly to do with disseminating and gathering information. Envoys were sent to tell the leaders of other regions in the Peloponnese about the result of the conference, and in particular the bishop of Monemvasía was sent to inform Petrobey, probably the most powerful figure of the Peloponnese not present at Vostítsa. Further messengers were sent to collect information, some to probe the intentions of the two crucial naval islands, Hydra and Spétses, others to Kapodhístrias to discover Russia’s attitude, and to the exiled bishop of Árta, now in Pisa, for information about the other European powers.
Finally, a decision was taken on how to respond when the bishops and leaders of the Peloponnese were next summoned to Tripolis for the regular six-monthly meeting with the Ottoman authorities on taxation and public order. If they went, they might be seized as hostages, whereas if they refused they would arouse Turkish suspicions. On balance it was decided that they should make excuses not to attend, should announce that they were going to Constantinople to put their grievances to the Sultan, and should go into hiding in their own districts or in the islands until the situation became clearer. As it turned out, it was easier to adopt this resolution than to put it into practice.
The acting governor of the Morea, Mehmed Salik, issued the expected summons to Tripolis at the beginning of March. He also announced, on top of the impositions already made to help finance the war against Ali Pasha, a doubling of the harach, the poll tax. The Greek response to the summons to Tripolis was patchy, and by no means everybody followed the line agreed at Vostítsa to prevaricate and stay away.
Yermanós, of course, made his excuses, as did most of the other bishops who had been at the Vostítsa meeting. He first pleaded that an attack of rheumatism in the feet confined him to bed, but when that excuse wore thin a more elaborate pretext was constructed. He set out with his fellow bishops from Kalávrita with a Turkish escort for Tripolis, and on the road a previously concocted letter, ostensibly from a friendly Turk in Tripolis, was delivered to them. The letter warned them that their lives would be in danger if they completed the journey and was ostentatiously read out in the presence of the Turkish escort. The charade completed, Yermanós and his party returned to Kalávrita and took refuge in the nearby monastery of Ayía Lávra, and after further inconclusive discussion about what to do next dispersed to different villages in the Kalávrita region to avoid seizure en masse. There they awaited events. It was clear that the cat-and-mouse game could not be played much longer.