From the first days of the revolution Kolokotrónis had insisted that the Greeks concentrated their efforts on the taking of Tripolis in the central Peloponnese. Equally determined to defend it was Mustafa, the kihaya bey or lieutenant-governor, acting for his superior Khurshid, pasha of the Morea, who since January 1821 had been away at Iánnina besieging Ali Pasha. Tripolis takes its name from the three derelict classical towns of Tegea, Mantinea and Palladion, which it was built to replace in the fourteenth century. It lies in the middle of a featureless plain about 2,000 feet above sea level, reached from the coast near Navplion by a steep and winding road. Behind the town, to the north and west, stands an amphitheatre of barren mountains on whose lower slopes, the Tríkorpha, the Greek forces were ranged.
In 1821 the town was ringed by a wall about two miles in circumference, some six feet thick and fourteen feet high on the outside, with a continuous parapet and towers at intervals, from both of which defenders could fire on attackers. Within the walls was a small citadel, a last refuge for the besieged. From the besiegers’ point of view the town was very different from most of the other strongholds ringing the Peloponnese into which the Turks had retreated. At Monemvasía, Navplion, Corinth and Árgos the fortresses were on top of a steeply sloping pinnacle of rock, while Tripolis was on an open plain. The citadels at Patras and Koróni were perched above the town and could be held even if the town itself was lost, whereas the Tripolis citadel was within the town. Methóni was defended by the massive and cleverly designed ramparts of the Venetian military architects, but Tripolis had only a primitive stone wall. Also Tripolis was landlocked, so the Turks could not support it from the sea. It was thus not only a desirable objective for the Greeks, from its central position and because it contained so many leading Turks and their wealth; it should also, in theory, have been a relatively easy target. But practice was a different matter.
When the kihaya bey Mustafa came south in May 1821 to take up his post in Tripolis, he brought a body of seasoned troops with him, the most formidable of which were 1,500 Albanian mercenaries under their commander Elmez Aga. Mustafa’s total garrison in Tripolis amounted to some nine to ten thousand men under arms. He had two bodies of specialist soldiers. One was a force of cavalry, which was valuable as an escort for foraging parties, and would have been more useful in attack if they could have brought the Greeks to battle on the open plain, an encounter which the Greeks were canny enough to avoid. The second specialist group was a complement of a hundred gunners brought from Constantinople. These might have been more useful if they had had reliable artillery, but by the end of the siege only seven of their thirty cannon were in even reasonable repair.
The total population of Tripolis, including the armed garrison, was estimated at about 30,000, roughly double the pre-war numbers, since though most Greeks had left many Turks had come in from the surrounding countryside. There was therefore an increased number for whom food and water had to be found, and the crowded conditions in the town were a breeding ground for disease. Among the distinguished Turks trapped in Tripolis were two provincial governors and the wife of the absent Kurshid Pasha, as well as his harem. Also in the town were a number of eminent Greeks, held as hostages since the early days of the revolution, including five bishops. Few of these Greek captives survived.
As the months of 1821 passed the Greek forces around Tripolis steadily increased from the two or three thousand who had been present in May to about 6,000. By late summer they were drawn up along the Tríkorpha foothills, to the north and west of the town and just out of the Turks’ cannon range, in four main groups. Kolokotrónis was on the left of the line and subordinate to him were Anagnostarás in the centre and Iatrákos on the right. On the higher slopes above them was a reserve force under Petrobey Mavromichális. His position in reserve was appropriate while the experienced captains held the forward positions.
An army of thousands stationed for months in rocky foothills on the edge of an arid plain obviously had to be supplied from elsewhere. Thus ovens in neighbouring villages were taken over and the villagers brought bread to the camp on donkeys and mules. Sheep and goats were also presented to the troops, and Karítena, twenty miles to the west behind the Greek lines, contributed 48,000 animals in the course of the siege. The Greeks also needed ammunition, so lead was stripped from roofs for use as shot, and libraries and monasteries were ransacked to provide paper for cartridges. The mountain village of Dhimitsána to the west was the main provider of powder, and was therefore spared any other requisitions.
In July 1821 a newcomer arrived at the Greek camp: Dhimítrios Ipsilántis, whose brother Alexander had led the disastrous revolt in Moldavia and Wallachia earlier in the year. On his way from Russia to Greece via Trieste, Dhimítrios Ipsilántis came across a Frenchman named Baleste, a veteran of Napoleon’s armies who had lived in Crete and so knew the language and conditions of Greece, and engaged him to organise the first regular Greek army, the earliest of many attempts, all ultimately failures, to introduce European systems into the Greek forces. Ipsilántis and Baleste sailed from Trieste for the Peloponnese in a ship flying the Russian flag, and Baleste was dropped off at Kalamáta to begin his task of organising regular troops while Ipsilántis went on to Monemvasía and then Tripolis. He came expecting to move smoothly into the leadership of the revolution in the Peloponnese, and brought with him three means of influencing events: a commission from his brother Alexander, written before his surrender to the Austrians, grandiloquently naming Dhimítrios as plenipotentiary of the General Committee of the Council of the society; the implied prospect of Russian help for the Greek cause, which was still hoped for in spite of the Tsar’s stated refusal to become involved; and a sum of money variously estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000 piastres.
Dhimítrios Ipsilántis knew virtually nothing of soldiering; his military experience was only a short period as a young captain on the Russian general staff at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Furthermore, he was a most unimpressive figure: less than five feet tall, skinny in body and limbs, prematurely balding, with a speech impediment and a diffident manner which came across as coldness, and lacking the decisiveness which might have overcome these disadvantages. However, all who had dealings with him recognised his high-mindedness.
With the arrival of Dhimítrios Ipsilántis a three-way split among the Greeks in front of Tripolis quickly became apparent, a split that became ever wider as the war went on. One party supported Ipsilántis, who remained popular even after news arrived of his brother’s disastrous defeat in the Danube provinces. A second element backed the military leaders, of whom Kolokotrónis was the acknowledged head. The third group, itself divided by personal feuds, consisted of the senior clergy and the civilian leaders. The civilian leaders, variously called proestí or prókriti in Greek, kojabashi in Turkish, and notables or primates in English, were in effect the aristocracy of the Peloponnese, mainly rich feudal landowners who had held considerable local governing powers under the Turks. Their aim, said their opponents, was simply to replace the Turks as rulers of their domains, and to make use of the military to bring this about.
Shortly after reaching the camp at Tripolis, Ipsilántis made an extremely high-handed move. In June a government for the whole Peloponnese, the Peloponnesian Senate, had been established, which replaced the local councils set up at Kalamáta, Patras and elsewhere when revolution first broke out. Ipsilántis now proposed that this should be replaced by a new government under his direction, and that he should become commander-in-chief of all the Greek forces. The civilian primates were outraged by these proposals, but Kolokotrónis, surprisingly, supported them. He could no doubt see that he would continue to exercise the chief military command, whatever nominal title was given to this spindly youth. Also Kolokotrónis was alert to the international repercussions of Greek discord, and when his men wanted to attack the primates he climbed on to a rock and addressed them:
We have taken up arms against the Turks, and therefore it is regarded by the whole of Europe that we Greeks have risen up against tyrants, and all Europe is looking on to see what will be the upshot…. If we kill our primates, what will the kings say? Why, that these people have not risen for freedom’s sake, but to slay their own colleagues, and that they are bad men, and carbonari; and then kings will give help to the Turks, and we shall have a heavier yoke than that which we have borne hitherto.1
Thus the troops were pacified. A compromise was reached, that the existing Peloponnesian Senate should be retained, not replaced as Ipsilántis had demanded, but that Ipsilántis should become its president, and have the role of commander-in-chief. Both Ipsilántis and the primates had had to make concessions, but Kolokotrónis had yielded nothing of substance.
As the summer sun blazed down on the dry plain of Tripolis, one of the first acts of the Greeks had been to try to deprive the besieged of drinking water. One account says that they cut off the channel which supplied water from outside to the town’s fountains. Kolokotrónis says that his men polluted this supply with a poisonous plant which he calls phlómos, probably of the spurge or figwort family, both of which were traditionally used as medicines but which in excess could be fatal. It is very doubtful if this ruse could have produced high enough concentrations to do any harm. In any case, Tripolis was not wholly dependent upon water from outside, since it contained a number of wells within its walls. As the siege progressed the Albanian troops of Elmez Aga took possession of the best wells and demanded payment for their use. Thus water was short in the town, but not short enough to bring an immediate capitulation.
Food was a more pressing problem for the besieged, but this was lessened by the Greeks themselves. Men of the Mani in particular would set up markets at night under the walls and sell the besieged bread and fruit, which the buyers often resold at a huge profit. For a time the Turkish cavalry provided protection for foraging parties, but this came to an end in late August when Greek forces under Kolokotrónis and Anagnostarás surprised an escorted group that had gone to fetch grain from a village a few miles north of Tripolis. The Turks were driven back into the town and lost the train of mules and horses carrying the collected provisions. A hundred or more Turks were killed, and Kolokotrónis had their severed heads carried before him as he returned to the Greek camp. ‘The Turks did not again venture forth from Tripolitsa,’ recorded Kolokotrónis. ‘This was the last time. They now fought only from the walls, and they despaired of being able to procure any more provisions.’2 The Turks’ horses too were deprived of fodder, and were reduced to grazing on the withered grasses below the city walls. Before long they were killed for food.
Overcrowding and lack of water and food soon led to the outbreak of disease in the embattled town. The American philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe was not at Tripolis, but as a doctor he vividly imagined the situation. ‘To make misery even greater,’ he wrote,
a disease broke out in the place and swept off hundreds every day. Sometimes it would seize upon a family, every member of which would be sick at the same time with it, and they lay in lonely misery, for not a friend came near them; or, if he came, it was only to see if a little bread or water might be plundered. Humanity had been frozen up by misery; and without a hand to bring a draught of water, or close the dying eyes, they gasped out their existence in sight of one another, and their bodies lay and rotted away in the solitary chambers.3
Starvation and disease might reduce the town in the end, but a quicker means of victory seemed to be offered by the delivery to the Greek camp of three mortars seized after the fall of Monemvasía. Initially nobody knew how to use them, but in late August an Italian named Tassi presented himself, claiming to be an expert in gunnery. Among the philhellenes serving with the Greeks was the young French artillery officer Maxime Raybaud, who could see at once that Tassi was a charlatan, with no knowledge of guns, trying to impress his hosts by casually dropping the names of Castlereagh, Metternich and Kapodhístrias into his conversation. Raybaud was a witness to Tassi’s first, and last, artillery experiment. In an earthwork at the safe distance of a mile from the town Tassi placed and loaded the best of the three mortars, while Ipsilántis looked on and the Greek soldiers sat on the surrounding heights to watch the anticipated spectacle. Tassi lit the fuse, but a muffled explosion made it immediately obvious that the firing had gone wrong, and that the mortar was smashed. The Greeks were furious, not least Kolokotrónis, and Tassi kept out of sight for a few days until Ipsilántis, good-hearted as ever, enabled him to slip away quietly. Tassi was later killed, with many other foreign supporters of the Greek cause, in the disastrous battle of Péta in the following year.
Raybaud was now persuaded to take charge of the Greek artillery at Tripolis. It was no easy task. Of the three mortars from Monemvasía, one had been wrecked by Tassi and the other two had been spiked. The Greeks ultimately possessed a further eight guns. Three sixteen- or eighteen-pounders were brought by Thomas Gordon, who arrived at Tripolis in early September, also bringing with him troops and weapons, and the remaining five cannon were smaller pieces. All needed attention, either to the guns themselves or to their mountings. Mountings could be improvised from tree trunks bound together by iron hoops, but repairing the guns was extremely difficult. ‘A piece of work’, wrote Raybaud, ‘which would scarcely have taken an hour in a workshop with the necessary tools, consumed whole days, and even then the job was botched.’4 Raybaud’s repairs were ultimately successful, but the Greek guns never did any damage to the walls of Tripolis.
Though conditions were hard for the Greeks on the hills, and grim for most of those in the town, the siege had its more light-hearted moments. When opposing troops were within earshot of each other, insults were genially exchanged. When a hat appeared above the ramparts of either side it drew a hail of bullets, and there were exultant cheers when the hat was revealed to be on a stick and not on a head. At other times the two sides fraternised. In the heat of the day, when fighting was regarded as impossible, a party of Greeks would cautiously approach the walls, from which a party of Turks would cautiously emerge. The two groups would then sit down for long conversations on the outcome of the siege and other matters, smoking their pipes the while. In the cool of the evening Raybaud would find Greek soldiers dancing to the music of a tambourine and a sort of oboe, or listening to a singer accompanying himself on a mandolin while chanting a warlike song or the verses of the revolution’s revered forerunner Rígas Pheréos.
Within days of his arrival in early July Dhimítrios Ipsilántis offered surrender terms to the besieged Turks, terms which were rejected with disdain. However, in the following months the town’s predicament worsened. The Greek forces had been steadily increased, to numbers variously estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, by the expectation of plunder. At the end of August a major blow to Turkish hopes of resistance came with the news that the Greeks had successfully blocked the advance of a Turkish army from the north down the Thermopylae route on the east coast; this meant that Tripolis could not be relieved that year. Thus divisions began to appear among the besieged. One party led by the lieutenant-governor Kihaya Bey Mustafa proposed fighting their way out through the encircling Greeks and joining their compatriots in the fortress of Palamídhi at Navplion twenty miles to the east. The Albanians under Elmez Aga looked for the outcome most profitable to themselves, which was likely to involve a separate agreement with the Greeks. The third group, which included most of the eminent Turks trapped in the town, supported a negotiated surrender. In short, the first group wanted honour, the second money and the third safety.
The surrender party in Tripolis now decided to open negotiations by making use of the Greek hostages who had been held in the town since the beginning of the siege five months earlier. These had been kept in appalling conditions. Their bodyguards had been killed, and the hostages with their servants, thirty-eight in all, were confined in a cramped cell with one small window. Masters were shackled by one chain round their necks and servants by another, so that if one on the chain stood up or sat down all of them had to follow. The Turks now in mid-September prevailed on the hostages to write a letter to their compatriots outside, calling on them to lay down their arms and throw themselves on the clemency of the Sultan, a ridiculous demand obviously, but a way of starting the process of parley. As such it was successful, and two days later representatives of the two sides met in a tent pitched between the Greek encampment and the town. The Greeks demonstrated that they were negotiating from strength by keeping the Turks waiting for an hour before joining them. Discussions continued in a series of meetings over the next ten days, the Turks’ demands being steadily whittled down.
It was only now, when negotiations for the long-expected surrender of Tripolis had begun, that the Greek leaders drew up a formal arrangement for the division of the spoils in the town. If Tripolis surrendered by agreement the troops, who had received no pay since the siege began, were to get two-thirds of the booty and the national treasury one-third. If it fell to attack the troops would be rewarded with a larger share: three-quarters instead of two-thirds. Country units absent guarding the mountain passes would get the same share as those besieging the town. There was provision for the families of Greeks killed during the siege, and a reward was offered for capturing alive any of the distinguished Turks in Tripolis. In the event these tidy formulae were almost totally ignored, and the national treasury got nothing.
Within a few days of the start of negotiations and the agreement on division of the spoils, something very odd happened: Dhimítrios Ipsilántis left the camp. He was followed by Gordon and all the philhellene officers except Raybaud and a few others, and took with him the regular troops who had come up from Kalamáta after training by Baleste. Ipsilántis’ party was accompanied by Kolokotrónis’ eldest son Pános. It was Kolokotrónis who took the lead in persuading Ipsilántis to leave, on the grounds that the Turkish fleet had, for the first time, arrived off the west coast of the Peloponnese and that Ipsilántis should go and oppose it. However, Ipsilántis took with him only one two-pounder mountain gun, ‘a redoubtable artillery’, commented Raybaud with heavy irony, for facing the might of the Ottoman navy.5 There is little doubt that Kolokotrónis wanted the principled Ipsilántis out of the way when Tripolis fell, and that the job of Pános Kolokotrónis was to see that he stayed away. It also seems likely that Ipsilántis and his companions, foreseeing what would happen when the Greeks entered the town, were ready to accept an excuse, however flimsy, for absenting themselves.
In the following days negotiations with the main Turkish representatives dragged on, but a separate agreement was quickly reached with the Albanians under Elmez Aga. They were to be allowed to leave for Epirus, with their weapons and possessions, on condition that if possible they joined the forces of Ali Pasha fighting the Turks, and in any case did not fight against Greeks. Other deals between groups or individuals were concluded. The Turks from the town of Vardhoúni in the Mani surrendered en masse to their former neighbours, and were allowed through the Greek lines to herd miserably behind the camp with other such refugees. Bobolína, the renowned lady ship’s captain who commanded a ship of the Spétses fleet after her husband’s death, arrived at Tripolis – with her ships, reported an Italian journalist who had obviously not looked at a map – and entered the town to haggle with Turkish women for costly gifts in return for their safety. Fighting was virtually halted while these various negotiations were being carried on.
The lull lasted only a few days more. After the equinoctial squalls of late September the heat of summer had blazed out again. ‘On Friday 5 October,’ wrote Raybaud, ‘the sun rose brilliantly. The heat was stifling, and the atmosphere painfully oppressive. Only the monotonous sound of the cicada broke the silence of the day, which seemed like a return to the dog-days of July.’6 On that somnolent morning when negotiations were continuing and a truce had been orally agreed, the tower near the gate to Navplion in the south-east wall of the town, and so on the far side from the main Greek encampment, was left unguarded. The few Turkish sentinels on the walls allowed a party of Greeks to approach to sell them grapes and these seized their opportunity, scrambled over the walls and opened the main gate to their compatriots.
The Greeks poured in in their thousands, intent on plunder and indiscriminate slaughter. The corpses of those who had died earlier of famine or disease and which lay unburied in the streets were now covered with new bodies. Those which had been buried were exhumed for their valuables, producing a further spread of disease. Women and children sheltering in their houses were thrown from the windows. Packs of stray dogs followed the victorious Greeks to tear apart and eat their victims. Fires from burning houses intensified the heat of the day, and a pall of smoke hung over the town in the windless air. The town resounded with the guttural Greek war-cry, which took on a deeper animal growl in the act of killing. Raybaud was in the town for most of the three days of carnage and managed to rescue a few of the inhabitants. He described the scene as a hell of fire and blood.
On the day of the assault the Albanians under Elmez Aga withdrew to the governor’s palace at the northern end of the town, and demanded fulfilment of the agreement that they should leave for Epirus. Before nightfall the Greeks, relieved not to be fighting them, allowed them out to bivouac temporarily in Kolokotrónis’ encampment. On the next day Elmez Aga and his troops left for the north, but even though deprived of their Albanian mercenaries the Turkish troops put up a stout resistance, either in houses or in the citadel at the southern end of the town. From the citadel forty Turks managed to fight their way out and get to Navplion, though without the kihaya bey Mustafa, who had always favoured this course; he and the other Turks of distinction were taken captive in the hope of a future ransom. The citadel, with no food and no source of water, surrendered on the third day to Kolokotrónis, who remained within its walls for several days, allowing nobody else entry, while he assembled for his own use the riches that had been put there for safe keeping.
While the citadel was still holding out, the most callous act of all was committed by the Greeks. Those who had earlier left the town by agreement had remained at the Greek camp; they numbered some 2,000, mostly women and children. A breakaway party of Greeks were determined to be rid of them, and leading them to a gorge where the plain meets the mountains killed them in cold blood. Raybaud had followed, and managed to rescue one young girl; he gave her into the care of a Corfiot living in the southern Peloponnese, who brought her up as one of his own family. Raybaud passed the scene of the massacre shortly afterwards, while the stench of putrefaction still hung over it, and again the following year when the bones had been picked clean by wild animals and birds of prey. Even as skeletons, he recorded, some of the victims still clasped each other in their last embrace.
How many died in the storming and sack of Tripolis? The population of the town, estimated at 30,000 when the siege began, had, when the town fell, probably been halved to about 15,000 by fighting, voluntary exodus, starvation and disease. Gordon believed that over half of the remainder, some 8,000, were killed at the time of the sack, for the loss of about 300 Greeks killed or wounded. Among the casualties were all but three of the surviving Greek hostages; the others, Gordon reported, ‘soon died through a too sudden change of diet, and transition from want and fear to joy and plenty’.7
There was nothing to justify the horrific carnage at Tripolis in the centuries-old military conventions which, brutal as they sound, did set some limits to conduct in war. These conventions laid down that, if a fortress was taken by assault, the garrison could be slaughtered and the town sacked for twenty-four hours, but that civilians should be spared. At the fall of Tripolis the Greeks treated the Turkish civilians as animals to be exterminated, and a particularly dishonourable act was their killing of defenceless refugees in the gorge. The mind-set which dehumanises one’s opponents is as old as war itself, and the Greeks and Turks were no stranger to it. Significantly, the Greek word for pursuing the enemy was to hunt, kinigó. This phraseology, if not the conduct, has persisted to our own day even in regular armies: in 1944 Montgomery’s message to the troops embarking for D-Day ended with ‘Good hunting!’
When Ipsilántis, Gordon and the other philhellenes left Tripolis just as negotiations for surrender began, they could not have foreseen that the talks would be ended by an opportunistic surprise assault by the Greeks. The most likely outcome at that stage was that surrender terms would be agreed and then disregarded, and that slaughter would follow. This was what had happened at the most recent fall of a Turkish-held fortress, New Navarino, at the end of July. Ipsilántis had a further motive for departure at this point: he needed to remove the regular troops from the scene. What chance would there be of turning them into a disciplined body if their first experience of combat was the sacking of a town in the company of the plunder-crazy irregulars?
Ipsilántis’ progress after leaving Tripolis achieved nothing. He could only watch helplessly from the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth while the Turkish fleet burnt the Greek ships in the harbour of Galaxídhi on the northern side. He was still on the gulf when news reached him and his companions of the fall of Tripolis, to which they returned a few days after the sack had ended. There is no doubt that he, and Gordon who returned with him, were horrified by what they found, and Gordon shortly afterwards left Greece in disgust, not to return until five years later. Gordon’s own account of the fall of Tripolis is less than frank about his own part. He does not mention that he departed and returned, and seems to condemn Ipsilántis for doing just that: Ipsilántis’ decision to leave was, says Gordon, ‘impolitic and intempestive’, and his march along the shores of the Gulf of Corinth ‘an useless military promenade’.8 If, as implied, Ipsilántis should have stayed, Gordon should have stayed too. They might at least have succeeded, as Raybaud did, in saving a few lives. Nevertheless, it is hard not to sympathise with the predicament of decent men who had come to support, as they thought, a noble cause, and found instead what they saw as a dirty war.
It is doubtful if anyone could have restrained the Greeks during the sack of Tripolis. Kolokotrónis wielded the greatest authority, and Raybaud reports that he and his fellow commander Iatrákos entered the town soon after the sack began, and tried unsuccessfully to get the rampaging soldiers to leave, which may have been from a desire to save booty from destruction rather than to save Turkish lives. Kolokotrónis in his memoirs only speaks, laconically and impersonally, of the conclusion of the sack: ‘The end came, a proclamation was issued that the slaughter must cease.’9
It was Kolokotrónis who gained most from the siege and sack of Tripolis. He had outmanoeuvred both Ipsilántis and the civilian leaders, he had brought to a successful conclusion the plan which he had continually urged of capturing Tripolis first, and he came away with a huge quantity of booty for himself, booty which enabled him to reward his men and so maintain the military force on which his position rested. He continued as the military leader in the Peloponnese, under the nominal and light-reined command of Ipsilántis, whose influence was now in decline. Kolokotrónis went on to further and less tarnished military successes, until he fell foul of the government and his fortunes were dramatically reversed.