In the first years of the Greek revolution the governments of the major European powers had little sympathy for it. Those governments’ subjects however often took a very different view. Travellers had increasingly visited Greece when the Napoleonic wars had made the Italian Grand Tour impossible, and had written glowingly of their experiences. The study of Latin and Greek was the mainstay of higher education. Many saw the Greeks as representing Christianity embattled against Islam, and as the birthplace of Europe’s civilisation resisting the barbarism of Asia. Perhaps only in the foreign reactions to the Spanish civil war of the 1930s has there been such a sharp contrast between the cold abstention of governments and the passionate involvement of individuals.
The shocks of the Napoleonic wars shaped the policies of the European powers in the following decades. In November 1815 at the close of the Congress of Vienna the victors over Napoleon – Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia – signed a treaty continuing for twenty years their Quadruple Alliance, which was pledged to uphold by force the post-Napoleonic settlement in Europe. Three years later France under the restored Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII was added to the grouping, making it a Quintuple Alliance. To sustain the so-called concert of Europe, the powers were to meet at regular congresses ‘for the purpose of consulting upon their common interest and for the consideration of the measures most salutary for the maintenance of the peace of Europe’.1 It was from the second of these congresses in 1821 that Tsar Alexander sent his uncompromising denunciation of Alexander Ipsilántis’ incursion into Moldavia and Wallachia.
In parallel with the Quadruple and later Quintuple Alliance, and often confused with them, was the Holy Alliance, initiated in September 1815 by the Tsar when his fluctuating religious fervour was at its height. The Holy Alliance’s original members were Russia, Austria and Prussia, who undertook ‘to consider themselves all as members of one and the same Christian nation, the three princes looking on themselves as merely delegated by Providence to govern three branches of One Family, namely Austria, Prussia and Russia, thus confessing that the Christian world, of which they and their people form a part, has in reality no other Sovereign but Him to whom power alone really belongs’.2 The signatories were to take as their sole guide the precepts of the Christian religion. In time the Holy Alliance was endorsed by all Europe’s rulers except the Pope, the non-Christian Sultan naturally, and Britain on the ostensible grounds that George III was incapable and the Prince Regent not yet the monarch. The Holy Alliance was anathema to progressives. As Shelley wrote in the preface to Hellas, in a passage which his cautious publisher omitted from the first edition: ‘This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members.’3
However, those who joined or endorsed the Holy Alliance were far from enthusiastic about it: Metternich dismissed it as ‘a high-sounding Nothing’, Talleyrand as ‘a ludicrous contract’. Nevertheless the formation of the Holy Alliance seemed to signal a commitment by governments to act from religious principle rather than self-interest. In theory this might mean that Greek appeals to altruism would win support from governments in the same way as from individuals. But there was of course an inherent and disabling contradiction in the principles of the Holy Alliance when applied to the Greek situation: the Alliance’s commitment to uphold the Christian religion meant support for the Greeks, but its commitment to uphold government meant support for the Sultan. Thus in the Greek conflict the influence of the powers of Europe would inevitably spring from their own national interests, and the only hope for Greece was that these interests might come to coincide with her own.
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A Polish ex-soldier who after a fight with the captain of a boat on the Mississippi had been put ashore and had lived on wild berries in a cave with an Indian woman … A watchmaker’s apprentice from Alsace who pretended to be deaf and dumb … A tall blond Piedmontese who murdered the girl behind the cash desk at the Café du Parc in Marseille. The list sounds like the ingredients for a thriller, as propounded in John Buchan’s The Three Hostages: ‘Let us take three things a long way apart…. Not much connection between the three? You invent a connection – simple enough if you have any imagination, and you weave all three into a yarn.’ For our three disparate characters there is no need to invent a connection: all of them took ship in 1821 to go and fight for the cause of Greek independence.
Not all the philhellene volunteers were so exotic. Maxime Raybaud had joined the French army as an eighteen-year-old in 1813, but at the end of 1820 had fallen victim to the army’s manpower cuts. Excited by the news of Alexander Ipsilántis’ venture – ‘I learnt with a thrill that Greece was shaking off her chains’4 – he left Paris for Marseille, where he joined the Hydra brig commissioned by Mavrokordhátos to carry war supplies to Greece. It sailed in July 1821 carrying five French officers, three Italian officers from Piedmont who were political exiles, a doctor, several junior officers, and sixty or so expatriate Greeks. On the first morning out these passengers were divided into four groups for daily arms drill under the officers, the polyglot Mavrokordhátos obligingly translating for those Greeks who did not understand the French or Italian commands. In Raybaud’s account the voyage had its diversions, as when they were becalmed off Sicily and watched the sailors dive from the highest yards and swim with dolphins for hours at a time. It also had its excitements, as when a storm drove them along at ten or eleven knots under a single sail, to the accompaniment of Albanian shanties from the Hydriot sailors. They expected to land at Patras, but learnt on arrival that Patras and virtually all the Peloponnesian strongholds were still in Turkish hands. They therefore sailed further north to Mesolongi, where the governor and the other Turkish families had been imprisoned after the Greeks seized the town. There at the beginning of August they transferred into small boats to travel through the shallow lagoon at the approach to the town, and they eventually stepped ashore to enthusiastic cries of ‘Long live Freedom!’, being the first supporters from abroad that the town had seen.
Marseille was the point of departure for most of the early philhellenes as it was for Raybaud. Eleven ships sailed from there between the outbreak of the revolution and the end of 1822, carrying in all some 360 volunteers, the largest contingents coming from the German states, France and Italy. At the end of 1822 the French authorities closed the port to ships bound for Greece, perhaps because France was now following Metternich’s pro-legitimacy lines, or because reports of returning philhellenes showed all too plainly that, as one of them put it, volunteers would find only misery, death and ingratitude. But in the early days optimism and idealism ran high. Throughout France, the German states and Switzerland politicians, churchmen and university professors proclaimed the triple message that Europe owed its civilisation to the ancient Greeks, that the modern Greeks were their descendants, and that Greece could be regenerated by driving out the Turks.
The message appealed particularly to the idealistic young. A youthful doctor in Mannheim said that the call went through him like an electric shock. A theology student in Prussia was excited by the idea of fighting where Epaminondas and Themistocles fell. A Danish student wrote: ‘How could a man inclined to fight for freedom and justice find a better place than next to the oppressed Greeks?’5 The other two main groups who rallied to the Greek cause were demobilised soldiers and political refugees, and many volunteers were both. Among the exofficers who achieved fame in Greece were the Frenchman Baleste, appointed by Dhimítrios Ipsilántis to form a regular Greek army; Colonel Thomas Gordon, the wealthy educated Scot who wrote one of the best contemporary accounts of the war; Captain Frank Abney Hastings, who had been dismissed from the British navy for challenging his superior officer to a duel; and the Württemberg count General Normann, who had fought both for and against the French in the Napoleonic wars and was thus not welcome in any army, and who led a motley German battalion to Greece from Marseille in January 1822. Among the ex-soldiers who were also political exiles were Tarella and Dania, both from Piedmont and both with service in the French army. Tarella later took over the small and barely trained body of troops which Baleste had put together, in which Dania became a battalion commander. Both men were dead within a year on the battlefield of Péta.
Apart from those with an obvious motive for going to Greece – idealism, soldiering, exile – the philhellenes included a clutch of eccentrics: a Bavarian china manufacturer intending to set up a factory in Greece, an out-of-work French actor, a dancing master from Rostock, and even a Spanish girl dressed as a man. The youth from Alsace, mentioned earlier, pretended to be deaf and dumb to avoid questions about his claim, made in sign language, that he was Prince Alepso of Árgos. His ruse was discovered when he arrived in Greece and after a drinking bout was heard talking in fluent German.
Many of the volunteers were rich enough to pay for their own travel on the road to Marseille and on the voyage to Greece, but many others, especially the idealistic young, depended on the goodwill of others, and committees were therefore formed to raise money to help the volunteers on their way. The most numerous were in democratic Switzerland, unaffected by great-power politics, where virtually every town had an active Greek society. The most practical were in the German states. In Leipzig, for example, a pamphlet identified the Greeks’ need for officers trained in artillery and military engineering, and called on the Greek societies not only to raise money but to establish contacts in Greece to receive the volunteers. Thus the enthusiastic young philhellene on the way to Marseille became a familiar sight on the roads of Europe. ‘In different parts of the country,’ wrote one English traveller, ‘I met with numerous companies of young men on foot, with knapsacks at their backs, on their way to Marseille, there to embark for Greece. These parties appeared to be composed chiefly of young German recruits and runaway students, and from the boisterous enthusiasm which they generally manifested, it was my endeavour always to avoid them as much as possible.’6
Associations to help the Greek cause were not restricted to the central parts of Europe, nor to raising money to help individual volunteers on their way. Greek committees were established in Spain, France, England, Russia and America. Their activities included raising subscriptions to help the Greeks directly by sending money or supplies, organising relief for Greek refugees from the conflict, and pressing their governments to act on the Greeks’ behalf. In Spain Madrid has a claim to have formed the very first Greek committee. France was last in the field. There was an early outpouring of French pamphlets supporting the Greek cause – over thirty in 1821–2 – but a specifically Greek committee was not established until February 1825 in Paris. By then Greece had moved into the foreground of public and government concern, partly because of the profound impression made by the death of Byron, partly because the outcome of the war came to be more clearly seen as affecting France’s national interests.
In England the question of support for Greece became entangled in domestic politics. Its earliest expression was in October 1821 from Dr Lemprière, author of the famous classical dictionary, with an appeal for funds published in the Courier, normally a paper reflecting the views of the Tory government. But the Courier quickly abandoned support for the Greeks; as a contemporary wrote, the editor ‘changed his note in a very few days when he found that [his sentiments] were unpalatable to our Government’.7 With Castlereagh as foreign secretary the Tory government line was that neutrality meant not attempting to support the Greek cause with funds, men or equipment; a Tory philhellene was thus virtually a contradiction in terms. Canning however, succeeding Castlereagh in September 1822, took the view that private subscriptions could go hand in hand with official neutrality, so that England’s influence in Greece could be strengthened without jeopardising the alliances of the powers. Thus in March 1823 the time was ripe for the formation of the London Greek Committee, but even this was a reflection of domestic politics. Out of nearly forty members of Parliament in the committee of eighty-five, virtually all were Whigs, Radicals or Independents. Another feature of the list was the number of Scottish and Irish names, suggesting, as one historian has put it, that ‘perhaps philhellenism provided a kind of surrogate for nationalist emotion, which lacked expression at home’.8 The London Greek Committee was, in short, a protest movement, and opposition to the government was the prime qualification for membership of it.
In the United States Greece found an immediate champion in Edward Everett, one of the most brilliant men of his generation. He was elected professor of Greek at Harvard in 1815 at the age of twenty-one, and visited Greece three years later. In 1820 he became editor of the North American Review and in 1824 a member of Congress, and so had two platforms from which he could speak to the nation. His later career was no less distinguished – governor of Massachusetts, ambassador to Britain, secretary of state. In 1863 it was Everett, now a US senator, who was invited to give the funeral oration at Gettysburg, a two-hour speech highly praised at the time but since overshadowed by Lincoln’s 272 words. In 1821 Koraís, Greece’s champion living in Paris, sent Everett the Greek appeal ‘To the Citizens of the United States’, which stated confidently that ‘it is in your land that Liberty has fixed her abode’, so that ‘you will not assuredly imitate the culpable indifference or rather the long ingratitude of the Europeans’.9 In November 1821, at Everett’s instigation, this appeal appeared in the newspapers. There followed a cataract of pro-Greek articles in the press, in the eastern seaboard states, as far west as Illinois and as far south as Mississippi. They praised Greek heroism, condemned Turkish atrocities while ignoring or explaining away Greek ones, and publicised local pro-Greek activities.
These activities were many and various. Some of the earliest groups sent provisions to Greece; in the winter of 1821–2 Charleston, South Carolina, sent fifty barrels of dried meat, and Springfield, Massachusetts, sent flour, fish, meat and sugar. Fund-raising associations sprang up, most of them channelling their contributions through the prestigious committee of New York, the city where a spectacular fund-raising ball was held at the beginning of 1824. By the end of that year the New York Committee alone had raised the equivalent of some £8,000, which the London Morning Chronicle ruefully admitted was ‘a sum, be it known to the shame of the United Kingdom, almost as large as all the subscriptions which the Greek Committees have been able to obtain in this country after eighteen months’ exertion’.10 Some of the fund-raising activities were imaginative. A New York City hatter promised to contribute 25 cents to the Greek cause for each of his new Greek-style hats sold, raising $140 in three months. A Louisville barber offered a week’s takings. ‘Let those who value freedom, both civil and religious,’ he announced, ‘… give me a call and thereby participate in the thrilling pleasure which I shall feel in contributing to the relief of an intelligent and refined people, who are now manfully contending for independence.’11 Sometimes imagination went too far. In Ithaca, New York, three vagrants were arrested for begging with forged papers purporting to show that they were collecting for the Greeks.
In Russia there was fervent and widespread sympathy for the Greeks, based not only on the usual grounds, but also on Russia’s special debt to Greece as the bringer of Christianity to Russia. Prince Alexander Golitsyn, a government minister and one of Russia’s leading philhellenes, wrote of the desire ‘to help the sons of that country which fostered enlightenment in Europe and to which Russia is even more obliged having borrowed from it the enlightenment of faith, which firmly established the saving banner of the Gospels on the ruins of paganism’.12 There was no incompatibility in Golitsyn’s position as both minister and philhellene since aid for the Greeks was government policy from the Tsar downwards, but this aid was to be restricted to two purposes only: relief for Greek refugees from the conflict, and the ransoming of Greek captives who had been enslaved. It was no part of the policy to send military supplies to Greece, and when on one occasion weapons on their way to Greece were intercepted they were sold and the money given to refugee relief.
Golitsyn was the prime mover in raising funds for the Greeks. In a government announcement of August 1821 he called for subscriptions to be made through the church in the confidence that ‘pious Christians, in faith and love, will certainly lend a helping hand’.13 Golitsyn also urged military governors to seek donations from the people of their regions, and civilian officials to approach the local merchants to participate in this ‘philanthropic work, which alone can bring eternal treasure and before which all the riches of the world are nothing’.14 By mid-August 1822 Golitsyn’s initiatives had raised 973,500 roubles, then the equivalent of over £9,000. Large individual donations helped swell the Russian total: 100,000 roubles from the Tsar himself, 15,000 roubles from the Dowager Empress, and thousands of roubles from members of the aristocracy. The Second Army, stationed in Bessarabia in south-west Russia and so closest to the Greek conflict, raised 4,000 roubles. In St Petersburg the merchants raised 25,000 roubles for refugee relief, and the craft guilds 5,000 roubles for ransom money. Contributions came even from the peasants in remote rural communities, where donations of as little as ten kopeks were touchingly recorded. Fund-raising did not slacken after an initial burst, as happened elsewhere. Continuity was ensured by the Tsar’s allocation of 13,000 roubles a month from the imperial treasury to refugee relief, though for aristocratic refugees only, a payment continued by his much less philhellenic successor Nicholas I. By the end of the decade Russia had raised several million roubles for the Greeks.
The number of Greek refugees needing help was formidable. Golitsyn in his first call for donations claimed that nearly 4,000 had reached Odessa in a single day, probably an exaggeration since the total for the year of 1821 was 12,000. A further 40,000 Greek refugees crossed into Russia from Moldavia and became the responsibility of the relief committee of Kishinev some hundred miles west of Odessa. Help was given not only in money but also in medical care, shelter, education for the young, and later in attempts to find employment. Money was distributed according to family size, but a heavier weighting was given to social status. Thus the family of a manual labourer might receive 60 roubles a month, the family of a merchant 120 roubles, an individual senior cleric 170 roubles, and an aristocratic family up to 2,500 roubles. It is no surprise, though it would cause an outcry today, that in Odessa aristocratic refugees, comprising only 5 per cent of the total, received nearly half the money distributed.
The second aim of Russian philhellenic activity was the ransoming of Greeks enslaved by the Turks, but this proved far more difficult than helping refugees. The ransom effort began in the summer of 1822, a year after Golitsyn launched the refugee relief programme, and was prompted by the distressing reports of slaves, many of them women and children, taken after the Turkish destruction of Chios. The initiative came from three Greek clerics in Bessarabia, who were particularly concerned about the forcible conversion of the enslaved Christians to Islam. Their object, they said, was ‘to save from the abyss of perdition as many Christians as providence will allow’,15 and Golitsyn wrote of those enslaved as ‘burdened by all the woes of captivity and confronted with the threat of being torn from the Church of Christ’.16
The first estimate of the scale of the problem gave the number of captives as 100,000 and the total ransom money needed as 500,000 roubles, a sum that was in fact raised in the next twelve months. But how was it to be applied? There was no expectation that all the captives could be ransomed, at an average cost of five roubles each, equivalent only to a few English pence. In February 1824 the ransom committee received a request to pay 3,250 roubles a head for a captive family of four, and later that year the current ransom fee was still increasing because the captors kept raising their prices. Even if an acceptable sum could be agreed, how should the money be transferred to the seller? If it was channelled through the senior Greek clergy in Turkish territory, this would simply lead to Turkish suspicion of the clerics and confiscation of the money. Alternatively, ransom money might be passed to the Greek government, but this would imply recognition of that government and violate Russia’s neutrality. In the event, although some enslaved Greeks were ransomed by the private initiative of wealthy Greeks or benevolent representatives of foreign governments, there is no evidence of a single successful ransom by the Russian organisation. About half the ransom money was later transferred, with the Tsar’s approval, to refugee relief, and the rest eventually passed to Kapodhístrias’ government to combat hunger and poverty in Greece itself.
Russian philhellenic activity was thus unusual in several respects. It sprang from a particularly close association between government and people, the Tsar publicly supporting an enterprise in which everyone from aristocrat to peasant joined. Also the church in Russia played a far bigger role in the Greek cause than elsewhere, naturally enough given the bond of shared Orthodoxy. In Russia alone there was an officially sponsored effort to ransom captives, an effort which was a total failure. The final unusual feature of Russian philhellenism is that, though Greeks from Russia went to fight for Greece’s cause, not a single Russian appears to have done so. Russians do not figure in contemporary accounts of Greece’s war. No death of a Russian philhellene is recorded: the monument to the philhellenes in the Roman Catholic church in Navplion displays the names of 274 foreign philhellenes who died in Greece, over a hundred from the German states, forty or so each from France and Italy, smaller contingents from Britain and elsewhere, a handful from Spain, Hungary, Sweden and Denmark, and a single Portuguese, but no Russian. It is remarkable that not one Russian idealistic youth or discontented soldier was apparently prepared to flout government policy and risk official disapproval like the Tsar’s denunciation of Alexander Ipsilántis, or if prepared to do so was unable to find a way of evading border and harbour controls in order to reach Greece. Nevertheless, it meant that Russians were spared the generally miserable experiences of the volunteers from other countries, whose high hopes of contributing to a noble cause were so often ended by a battle-field bullet or by a lingering disease.