By the end of the summer of 1821, with the war only six months old, the Greeks were riding high. They had captured the four fortresses of Monemvasía, Old and New Navarino and Tripolis, they had blocked Turkish advances down both eastern and western routes north of the Gulf of Corinth, and at sea they had had their first success with a fire-ship. These Greek victories had thrown a crucial question into sharp relief: who runs the war? Various bodies had been set up to control operations, at least in name, in the different places where the revolt had spasmodically broken out. At Patras in the Peloponnese the insurgents set up ‘a sort of council for the general direction of affairs’, and similar bodies with equally vague responsibilities were formed in other Peloponnesian towns. These were pulled together in June 1821 into a single Peloponnesian Senate. However its remit was no more specific than before: its members were to act for the common good and prosecute the war ‘in whatever way Divine Providence guides them and they think appropriate’.1 Also its powers were temporary, lasting only until the fall of Tripolis and the summoning of a national assembly.
In mainland Greece north of the Gulf of Corinth two separate regional governments were established towards the end of 1821. In West Roumeli a Senate was set up, based on Mesolongi and headed by Alexander Mavrokordhátos. In East Roumeli the government was called the Ários Págos, borrowing the name of the oldest judicial council of pre-classical Athens, and was dominated by Theódhoros Négris. Négris was a phanariot who had risen sufficiently high in the Ottoman hierarchy to be appointed secretary to the Turkish embassy in Paris, and was on his way there by ship when he learnt that the revolution had broken out; he immediately headed for Greece. In both West and East Roumeli the military were to be subordinate to the civilian government, reflecting the European outlook of both Mavrokordhátos and Négris. The East Roumeli constitution had one unusual feature: it was the first revolutionary document to envisage a future king for Greece, but that was a long way in the future. In December 1821 the Greeks came together at a site near ancient Epídhavros, east of Navplion, for their first national assembly. The aim of the assembly was to form a single national government.
It is easy to think of the Greeks of the war of independence as a single body politic, and easy to assume that unity against the Turks and the bonds of religion and language submerged all other differences. In fact, however, Greek society was criss-crossed by a large number of fault lines, and was so divided that perhaps it should not be called a society at all.
On land the Greeks had taken up the war in three main regions: the Peloponnese and, north of the Gulf of Corinth, West Roumeli and East Roumeli, the last two being divided by the southern spurs of the Píndos mountains. The war at sea was in the hands of several Aegean islands, notably Hydra, Spétses and Psará. Each of these geographical divisions looked for recognition of its own status and interests in any centralised government: the Peloponnese as the region which had been cleared of Turks, apart from a few isolated fortresses, and in which the revolution had been successfully begun; East and West Roumeli as the areas most exposed to Turkish attack from the north; and the islanders as the defence against the Turkish navy. As well as having different interests the people of different regions often heartily disliked each other. As a modern historian has put it, ‘The Roumeliots looked on the more prosperous and peaceable Peloponnesians as untrustworthy and effete. The Peloponnesians regarded their northern brothers as backward and boorish. The Islanders displayed an insular contempt for all mainlanders.’2 There was also ill-feeling within regions: the men of the Mani were regarded as dishonest and disreputably rapacious by other Peloponnesians, and Hydra and Spétses were in constant disagreement with each other.
A second major split was between different social groups, the three main ones being the civilian leaders, the military captains and the so-called westernisers, those who had arrived from abroad with ideas of government on western European lines. The civilian leaders comprised the landowning primates and the senior clergy, and both bodies had had considerable authority in their own localities under the Turks. The bishops, of whom there were forty-one, decided civil (but not criminal) cases between Christians, and mediated with Greek or Turkish leaders over individual disputes. The other civilian element, the primates, were in effect the operators of the Ottoman system of local government. In the Peloponnese they met annually as a provincial assembly to advise the governing Turkish pasha, and two members of this assembly were chosen as virtual ambassadors of the Peloponnese to Constantinople, where they could seek remedies for injustice and even influence the appointment of a new pasha. Because of their close co-operation with the Turks the primates were widely distrusted, and Dhimítrios Ipsilántis castigated them as men ‘who, sharing the sentiments of the Turks, wish to oppress the people’, and as ‘the friends and companions of tyrants’.3
The primates were drawn from the rich, and their wealth was based on land. In the Peloponnese the primates, with the monasteries, held about a third of the productive land or roughly 700 square miles. With the revenue derived from land the primates were able to bid for the lucrative tax-farming contracts from the Ottoman government. Because they collected both rents and taxes in kind rather than cash, and they alone had the resources to get the produce to markets or ports, they were able to exert a virtual monopoly control over prices. Thus the wealth of the primates multiplied, a wealth regarded by the peasantry as the fruits of blatant exploitation – another reason to distrust them.
The second main social group consisted of the military captains. Many had previously been either a brigand klepht or an armatolós hired by the Ottoman government to control the klephts, and a captain would often alternate between the two roles. Others had held the rank of kápos, leader of a primate’s armed force and under his authority, with no independent command granted by the Turkish administration; Kolokotrónis himself may never have been more than a kápos, in spite of his claim to the more glamorous title of armatolós. Here was a source of friction between captains and primates. Many a captain would previously have been either a threat to the primates as a klepht, or a competitor with independent status as armatolós, or a subordinate kápos now risen to greater prominence than his former employer. Of all the groups the captains had the closest link with the common people, from whom they had usually come and from whose ranks they recruited their troops. Some of the captains had served in foreign armies, and had learnt, as Kolokotrónis certainly had, how the revolution was likely to be viewed by foreign powers, and the importance of conciliating them. Thus these captains had certain common ground with recently arrived westernisers, men otherwise totally different from them.
These westernisers formed the third social group, and were drawn from three main categories: merchants in the Ottoman empire and in the major cities of Europe where the Greek diaspora had settled; phanariots, the senior civil servants of the Turkish government, especially in the administration of Moldavia and Wallachia; and Greek professional men who had been educated abroad. The most prominent of the westernisers was Alexander Mavrokordhátos, from one of the leading phanariot families. When the revolution broke out he was living at Pisa in Italy, where he had been part of Shelley’s circle. From there he took ship to Marseille, collected supplies for the Greeks and a number of philhellene volunteers, including Raybaud, and landed at Mesolongi at the beginning of August 1821, where he began improving the town’s defences and establishing his own leadership. Still only thirty, his travels had given him mastery of seven languages, and experience in the government of Wallachia had introduced him to the arts of diplomacy. His portraits, with circular spectacles or elegant cravat, present him as a somewhat owlish figure, perhaps an academic or a civil servant rather than a leader of men. But appearance was deceptive. ‘His manners are perfectly easy and gentlemanlike,’ wrote Howe,
and though the first impression would be from his extreme politeness and continual smiles that he was a good-natured silly fop, yet one soon sees from the keen inquisitive glances which involuntarily escape from him, that he is concealing, under an almost childish lightness of manner, a close and accurate study of his visitor…. His friends ascribe every action to the most disinterested patriotism; but his enemies hesitate not to pronounce them all to have for their end his party or private interest…. Here, as is often the case, truth lies between the two extremes.4
Mavrokordhátos understood the arts of politics better than any other Greek participant in the struggle, and as government bodies formed and re-formed in the course of the war it was often Mavrokordhátos’ influence, sometimes behind the scenes, which was dominant.
The westernisers believed that the new Greek state should have four main characteristics. First, it should be a constitutional state, guaranteeing individual rights and based on popular elections; this was naturally favoured by the common people. Second, though Orthodoxy would be the state religion, the state should be secular, with the church having no special powers such as it had enjoyed under Ottoman rule; this was of course unpopular with the ecclesiastical leaders. Third, it should be based on western legal codes and systems of administration; this cut at the traditional powers of the primates in regional government. Finally, it should have a regular army, paid and controlled by the government and trained on western European lines; this was never fully achieved, but the prospect of it antagonised the military class, who were still convinced with some justification that their irregular bands, operating as klephts had always done, were the best means of defeating the Turks.
The new national government which the Epídhavros assembly was to hammer out needed to achieve three things. It must be effective in prosecuting the war. It must satisfy the foreign powers, whose support was recognised as crucial. Finally, it must balance the conflicting claims of the various interest groups. The proceedings of the assembly were therefore not just a drily rational exercise in constitution-making; they were a covert but fierce competition for power.
The assembly which came together in the last weeks of 1821 was named the Assembly of Epídhavros, and its outcome the Constitution of Epídhavros. The name Epídhavros had all the right associations – birthplace of the healing god Asklepios, site of the magnificent classical Greek theatre – but in fact the assembly was held at the nearby coastal village of Piádha. Raybaud thought it a delightful setting and, probably with a touch of hyperbole, wrote of its ‘pleasant woodlands and a sky ever pure: arbours of orange trees provided shade, and before them lay the island of Salamís’.5 There were delegations from the Peloponnese, East and West Roumeli and the Aegean islands, fifty-nine members in all, meeting in a barnlike chamber in the middle of the village. Mavrokordhátos was elected president of the assembly. None of the captains attended, and an even more notable absentee was Dhimítrios Ipsilántis, who at the beginning of December had gone to take command of the siege of the fortress of Corinth. He was hoping to enhance his standing as a national leader by a military success, but by the time Corinth fell to the Greeks in early 1822 the assembly had finished its work and a government had been formed.
The first act of the assembly was to appoint a committee to draw up a constitution, a committee composed of twelve members, three from each of the four main regions in a careful balancing of their interests. This committee was dominated by Mavrokordhátos and Négris, and worked fast, drawing in part on the regional constitutions which had already been formulated and in part on the constitutions of the United States and France. Within a fortnight the Constitution of Epídhavros was drafted, approved by the assembly and signed, being backdated by a few days to 1 January 1822 (Old Style) to mark the beginning of Greece’s first calendar year of independence. The constitution was firmly labelled as provisional, and was to be reviewed after one year. Many saw it as a holding operation until Greece acquired a king, many of the articles were obviously too loosely drawn to be permanent, and in any case nobody then knew what the future extent of the Greek state might be and what other interests might have to be accommodated.
The constitutional document began with a brief and dignified preamble. ‘In the name of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity: the Greek nation, under the fearful domination of the Ottomans, unable to bear the heavy and unexampled yoke of tyranny and having with great sacrifices thrown it off, declares today, through its lawful representatives gathered in National Assembly, before God and man, its political existence and independence.’6 It then laid down the essentials of religion (the state religion to be Greek Orthodoxy) and civil rights (equality before the law; security of property, honour and personal safety; no taxation without a previous law). The rest of the document established the machinery of the state, with three largely independent arms of government providing checks and balances against each other, very much on the American model. The Senate, elected for a year by the people, would pass laws, and specifically would vote on declarations of war and peace treaties and on an annual state budget. The Executive of five members, appointed by the assembly also for a year, would run the government and prosecute the war, appointing eight ministers to be responsible for departments of foreign affairs, internal affairs, finance and so on. A crucial part of the system of checks and balances was that Senate and Executive could each veto the acts of the other. The third arm of government was to be a judiciary independent of the other two branches and charged with drawing up new laws; a supreme court was to function at the seat of government, and local courts throughout the country. But these provisions for a judiciary remained a dead letter, and the framers of the constitution may have foreseen this when they stipulated that, until new laws were drawn up, Byzantine law should govern all criminal and civil cases, except in commercial matters where French law should apply.
Such was the machinery of government, designed with its checks and balances to work like a well-regulated clock, but whether it did so would depend upon who filled the posts created. Mavrokordhátos, one of those representing West Roumeli, had dominated the assembly and became president of the Executive, in effect the national president. Of the ministers, Négris was the most prestigious, holding the foreign affairs portfolio and presiding over ministers’ meetings. The most impressive minister was Iánnis Koléttis, responsible for internal affairs, who a month later also took over the war ministry. He had been trained in medicine at Pisa, whose university could provide better education than any Greek institution. He had also been schooled in ruthless intrigue as a physician at Ali Pasha’s court, and practised a sort of masterly inactivity. ‘With patience and stolid silence,’ wrote Finlay, ‘he profited by the blunders of his colleagues, always himself doing and saying as little as possible. He trusted that others, by their restless intrigues and precipitate ambition, would ruin their own position, and leave the field open for him. His policy was crowned with success.’7 He also had undoubted presence; Howe noted that a stranger who saw him in a crowd would turn to look at him again, and mark him for an extraordinary man. From the civil strife of 1823 and 1824 Koléttis emerged as the most forceful of all the Greek leaders.
The Senate was to comprise those elected as delegates to the assembly, and Ipsilántis, still away besieging Corinth, was appointed its president. He was influential enough to be offered this olive branch, though the post fell far short of the position of national president and commander-in-chief which he had demanded the previous summer. Vice-president of the Senate was Petrobey Mavromichális, a man never far from the centre of power, who acted as president in Ipsilántis’ absence.
The three aims of those who drew up the Constitution of Epídhavros were to create a government which would balance the interests of the competing groups, would impress foreign powers and would be effective. Did they succeed?
Balance between the regions was very precisely maintained in terms of appointments. All four regions were represented more or less equally on the twelve-member committee which drew up the constitution, on the five-member Executive, in the group of eight ministers and in the Senate. However, no balance was achieved in two important areas. First, there was no definition of the relationship between the new national government and the existing regional governments; the national government was simply given broad general powers, while regional governments were left to carry on as before. This nettle was not grasped until a second national assembly fifteen months later, which decreed the abolition of the regional governments. The other imbalance concerned the military captains. They had no representatives at the assembly, they were offered no posts in the government and they became nominally subordinate to the Executive, which was charged with the overall direction of the land and sea forces. This too changed at the second national assembly, where captains attended as delegates, and the conflict between them and their opponents became open and violent. The captains had more than enough power to insist on representation at Epídhavros if they had wanted it. However, some of them may have felt that they would be outmanoeuvred in constitutional debate by smooth-talking theorists, others may have believed that it was better not to be associated with arrangements that were likely to try to clip their wings, and the strongest of the captains may have thought that the new government was anyway an irrelevance and would not be able seriously to curtail their powers as the dynamos of the revolution. So the captains played no part at Epídhavros.
Of the impact of the new government on foreign powers, Finlay wrote caustically: ‘A good deal was done by the Greeks at Epidaurus to deceive Europe; very little to organise Greece.’8 This was unfair. What Greece wanted from Europe was recognition and money. After Epídhavros money could be raised by borrowing abroad, as Greece now had a properly established government to which loans could reasonably be made. The new government lost no time in exploiting this opportunity and six of the seven laws passed in the government’s first two months concerned the raising of loans abroad. When a loan was finally secured in London two years later, the deception lay not in the Constitution of Epídhavros but in the overblown accounts of Greece’s resources and prospects for which Greece’s philhellenic friends were mainly to blame. As for recognition, this was slow in coming. When in the following March the Greek government asked the Ionian government for the return of an impounded ship, the reply from the governor Sir Thomas Maitland was withering: ‘His Excellency has just received letters from persons who give to themselves the name of the Government of Greece, by a messenger now in this port…. His Excellency is absolutely ignorant of the existence of a “provisionary government of Greece,” and therefore cannot recognize such agent…. He will not enter into a correspondence with any nominal power which he does not know.’9
Finally, was the new government designed to be effective? There was probably only one way in which the government could fully co-ordinate its war effort, and that was for wide powers to be given to a few, and if possible to one man. This is what Kapodhístrias, Greece’s future president but at present at the Russian court, had urged some months before the assembly met, but Kapodhístrias was out of touch with the reality of the Greek situation. The competing interests were not going to hand over power to a restricted oligarchy, and there was no one man, no George Washington, who had emerged as an accepted leader with widespread support. The government formed at Epídhavros was the exact opposite of the strong central administration which Kapodhístrias had called for. As both arms of the government had the power of veto, neither Executive nor Senate could act without the consent of the other. Members of both served for a year only, and so had to think constantly of the next election rather than the conduct of the war. There were probably far too many ministers: as Bishop Ignátios wrote from Pisa, ‘even second-class kings have only two or three ministers’.10 Perhaps the most fatal weakness was the failure to define the relationship between the central and regional governments and the powers of each. Balance had been achieved, but at the cost of potential paralysis.
This point was put strongly by the English utilitarian philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham, who sent the Greek government his comments on the new constitution a few months later. His opening remarks delighted the Greeks: ‘To find the provisional Grecian Constitution in so high a degree conformable to the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number has been matter of considerable and no less agre[e]able surprise to me,’ he wrote.11 However, he saw a danger in the constitution’s plethora of potential vetoes, which he called ‘latent negatives’. The president of the Senate, for example, was empowered to call the Senate into session, and it was open to him never to call it into session at all. Other individuals were required to sign, countersign or seal resolutions, and simply by doing nothing could block the government’s actions. Bentham also deplored the excessive number of ministers, and would have done away with them altogether, making members of the Executive responsible for a reduced number of departments. But his most fundamental criticism was of the division of powers between the arms of government, which underlay the whole principle of checks and balances. The bodies among whom power was divided would, he thought, compete against each other in their own interest, not in the interests of the people. It would be better, Bentham maintained, for the Executive and the judiciary to be dependent on the Senate, and the Senate in turn to be dependent upon the will of the people through universal suffrage. The tenor of all Bentham’s comments was that every branch of the government should be as responsive as possible to popular sovereignty, which he saw as coinciding more or less with the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Bentham was right to treat the work of the assembly at Epídhavros as a serious attempt to produce a workable system of government. But Epídhavros was also the arena of a competition for power, and in this Mavrokordhátos was the main beneficiary. He had achieved all he could have hoped for: a constitution drawn up under his guidance, and the leading position in the newly formed national government. Then, surprisingly, he went away. He left first for Hydra; the island’s support was going to be vital in the defence of Mesolongi against the Turkish navy. Then in May 1822, with the Senate’s agreement, he returned to Mesolongi and continued preparations for the defence of the town and the process of building up support throughout the region. Thus Mavrokordhátos spent hardly any time filling his role as president of the Executive and his absences clearly demonstrate his priorities: prestige might lie with the provisional government of Epídhavros but his power base in Mesolongi and West Roumeli was much more important to him. Nevertheless, he was astute enough to grasp the presidency of the Executive to ensure that nobody else could use it to build his own influence. A contemporary coined a pleasing analogy for Mavrokordhátos’ tactics: ‘He imitates the cunning of the hedgehog who, they say, flattens his needles and makes himself thin to enter his burrow, and once inside fluffs them out again and becomes a ball of prickles to stop anyone else getting in.’12