On reaching Greece most of the Philhellene volunteers urgently needed to find a military unit which they could join and which would feed and support them. This was not easy. The Greek forces were almost wholly made up of bands each attached to a virtually independent captain, who appointed his relations as his officers and drew his men from his own locality. For Europeans, joining such a band was out of the question. They would not have been accepted into it, and even if they had been they would have been unable to stand the life of eating badly if at all, sleeping rough, ever present filth and lice, difficult marches and rough companions with whom they could not communicate. Only one body of troops constituted an army in anything like the European sense, and this was the Regiment Baleste, the force which Baleste, on Dhimítrios Ipsilántis’ instructions, had begun to put together at Kalamáta in the summer of 1821.
Baleste had the rare combination of military experience from service under Napoleon and fluent command of Greek from his subsequent years in Crete, where his father was a merchant. With the help of a handful of French and Italian officers he set about recruiting for the Regiment Baleste, which was intended to be the core of a Greek regular army run on European lines and to be paid and controlled by the Greek government. France’s military system was adopted, which, said Raybaud, gave extreme satisfaction to the French volunteers. However, creating this force was a slow and difficult business. Virtually none of the Greek irregulars joined, preferring independence to discipline, plunder to putative pay, and the company of kinsmen and friends to that of strangers. There were some recruits from the Ionian islands, where Greeks had served in British regiments and were familiar with European military systems, but most of the Greek volunteers for the regular force were refugees from northern Greece or Asia Minor and so were strangers in the Peloponnese, without friends or family and with no refuge other than with Baleste’s troops. The number of Greek regulars fairly quickly reached 200, but then rose more slowly and probably never exceeded 600 in the lifetime of the force. Nevertheless, a uniform was devised and distributed, black with a national emblem in three colours on the headgear, and a system of ranks was drawn up with the intended rates of pay for each. These military trappings were plentiful, but basic necessities were almost nonexistent: for food and lodging Baleste’s recruits were dependent upon the generosity of the people of Kalamáta, where they were based.
The first effort of the Regiment Baleste was an assault on the Palamídhi fortress at Navplion in December 1821. It was a total failure, and it was of this incident that Kolokotrónis said: ‘The Greeks were not equal to taking castles such as those by assault; it was folly to attempt it.’1 The affair at Navplion eroded yet further any trust the Greeks had in European methods of fighting. Some of the philhellenes also became disillusioned, notably Baleste, who left shortly afterwards to join the revolution in Crete and within a month was captured and killed in a failed assault on Réthimno.
Nevertheless Mavrokordhátos, now president of the Executive in the newly formed government, was convinced that the Europeans could play a useful role in the revolution, but now accepted that they should form a unit of their own. This unit was to be a part of the regiment of regular troops initiated by Baleste, but would not include all the philhellenes; a number of them, especially the more senior officers, were needed to provide a European element in the command of the regiment as a whole. By the beginning of the summer of 1822 the philhellenes had assembled at Corinth, for the moment the seat of the government which had been established at Epídhavros, and there at the beginning of May the new units were presented with their standards. The regular forces were organised as one regiment of two battalions, one battalion of Greeks and one of philhellenes. Mavrokordhátos became the formal head of the regiment, with Normann, head of the German volunteers, as his chief of staff. Colonel of the regular regiment was the Italian Tarella, with another Italian, Gubernatis, as his lieutenant. The Greek battalion, 400 strong, was made up of five companies, while the philhellene battalion of 120 men under Dania as battalion commander formed two companies, one mainly of Germans and Poles under a Pole, and the other mainly of French and Italians under a Swiss. A small group of philhellenes was in charge of their pathetically small artillery of two field guns. The presentation of standards took place at the foot of the towering crags of the Akrokórinthos and Dania’s units were given the title of the Battalion of Philhellenes.
By the summer of 1822 the Turks were in a much stronger position to repeat their attempt of the previous year to march south. Mavrokordhátos’ strategy for resisting them was shaped by two main considerations. First, the Souliots were still holding out in their mountainous enclave against Turkish attacks, and could put into the field some 4,000 fighting men. If they could be supported they would be a permanent threat to any Turkish army moving south from Iánnina. Second, Mavrokordhátos now had under his command a regiment of regular troops including a battalion of philhellenes, and he wanted to use them and to demonstrate the effectiveness of European military methods. Thus he was led to challenge the Turks to a setpiece battle on the plain of Péta, within sight of Árta where the main body of Turkish troops was assembled under Omer Vrionis and only a dozen miles from the entrance to the Soúli region.
First the Mavrokordhátos forces needed to be brought up from Corinth. One party with the two field guns went by ship as far as Vostítsa, which lies halfway along the Gulf of Corinth. The rest set off for Vostítsa overland; this group included Mavrokordhátos himself and his general staff, a party of Souliots under Márkos Bótsaris, a company of Ionian islanders from Zákinthos, Kephaloniá and Ithaca, and several hundred Greeks from the Peloponnese. Raybaud, as one of Mavrokordhátos’ staff officers, was in the overland party and described the journey, emphasising the contrasts as he usually did: a wretched first night camping on marshy ground in pouring rain; a splendid welcome on the second night at the monastery of Ayia Iríni, where whole sheep were roasted for them and there were goatskins to sleep on; the sun breaking through on the third day and sparkling from the rocks of Delphi and the double peak of Parnassos on the north side of the gulf. The two parties were reunited at Vostítsa and continued overland, skirting the Castle of the Morea with its Turkish garrison and marching to a point beyond Patras from which eight brigs took them across to Mesolongi at the beginning of June. There Mavrokordhátos spent ten days organising food supplies for his troops, while the philhellenes drilled and manoeuvred. ‘It was unimaginably difficult’, wrote Raybaud, ‘to train the men in the harsh and precise details of service in the ranks, in strict discipline and in the advantages of systematic instruction, when these men were Europeans of a generally difficult temperament and different in their habits, education, language and weapons.’2 These differences could become violent, and while in Mesolongi a German shot a Frenchman dead in a duel.
Mavrokordhátos’ forces, about 700 regulars plus twice as many irregulars, were far too small to tackle a Turkish army of nine to ten thousand men. Mavrokordhátos and his troops therefore moved north to Kombóti, a few miles south-east of Árta, to get the support of the local captains, the most prominent of whom were Georgios Varnakiótis based at Kombóti and Gógos Bakólas at Péta. The loyalty of Bakólas was very much in doubt. Now aged seventy, with a lifetime as alternately klepht or armatolós leader behind him, he was highly respected by his men, not least for a successful battle against the Turks on his home ground of Péta the year before. He was now in open communication with the Turks. According to him, this was simply a ruse to get the Turks to provide his troops with supplies, and he was still totally committed to the Greek cause. However as well as using these supplies for feeding his own troops he was making a profit by selling them on to other Greek forces. He became, said Raybaud, the monopoly supplier of wine, rum, biscuit and coffee, and even adjusted the exchange rates for foreign currency to suit himself. A further problem was that Bakólas was believed to be responsible for the death on Ali Pasha’s instructions of Márkos Bótsaris’ father: would he now be a reliable comrade in arms of the son?
By the beginning of July Mavrokordhátos’ forces, regular and irregular, local and imported, reliable and unreliable, amounted to barely 2,000 men, whereas he had hoped to raise three or four times that number. Mavrokordhátos was further weakened by the temporary absence of some of his best soldiers. Márkos Bótsaris and his troops, accompanied by two other Greek captains and their men, had left on an expedition which proved fruitless to help the Souliots beleaguered in their homeland. To bring the Turks to battle by an attack on them was therefore out of the question; the best option was to occupy a good defensive position and wait for the Turks to do the attacking. Péta offered just such a position, and it was there on 4 July that the philhellenes, the regulars and the Ionians established themselves under the command of Normann. Mavrokordhátos, with a small staff, withdrew to a village some ten miles south of Péta, and he was later criticised for playing the château general too far from the scene of action.
It was fortunate that Márkos Bótsaris and his companions returned from the unsuccessful venture into Soúli ten days later on 15 July, since by then Mavrokordhátos knew from a Greek in Árta that the Turks would attack next morning. The final disposition of the troops at Péta was now hurriedly agreed. The village of Péta is on a low hill at the edge of a plain, with Árta a few miles to the west and the Makrinóros mountains to the east. Behind the village to the east is a north–south ridge some two miles long, and in front of it a parallel ridge, lower and shorter, the low hill of the village providing a link between the two. By the night of 15 July the Greek forces were in position. On the higher ridge Bakólas occupied the right at the northern end, two other Greek captains Varnakiótis and Vlachópoulos the centre, and Márkos Bótsaris and his Souliots the left; the two old enemies, Bakólas and Bótsaris, were thus kept as far apart as possible. On the forward ridge the Greek regulars under Tarella were in the centre, the Ionians on the right with the two field guns and their philhellene crew, and the main body of philhellenes under Dania on the left, the position regarded as the one of maximum danger. There were some 1,200 men on the upper ridge, and only about 500 on the lower.
An hour before dawn on 16 July the whinnying of horses and other sounds of an army on the march confirmed the expected attack. The Turks advanced on the Greek positions in a huge crescent, with 600 cavalry on their right wing, and as they approached the forward ridge, firing as they came, they were amazed to find that their fire was not returned. Only when they were within a hundred paces did the regulars, in a controlled display of European tactics, let loose a lethal fire, supported by an enfilade from the two cannon at the northern end of the ridge. During the next two hours the Turks repeated their assault on the forward ridge with no greater success, and their left wing, attacking the Greek irregulars on the upper ridge, was driven back by fire from the traditional tamboúria earthworks. It seemed that European methods had proved themselves, and that it was after all possible for regulars and irregulars to act together.
Even Bakólas seemed to be co-operating when his troops drove off a body of Albanians attacking his position on the right of the upper ridge. However, some fifty of the attacking Albanians took cover rather than retreating, and then scaled the ridge at a point which Bakólas had now left unguarded. This turned the battle. First Bakólas’ troops fell back along the ridge, then those of the captains in the centre and finally even the Souliots of Márkos Bótsaris, all retreating to the shelter of the mountains behind them, leaving the Turks in possession of the upper ridge and the regulars at their mercy below. The Turks poured down, using the village of Péta as a sort of stepping stone on which troops from the plain joined them. The forward ridge too was rolled up from the north. The Ionians succumbed first and the two cannon were put out of action, then the regulars in the centre were cut to pieces trying to withdraw through the village, and finally the philhellenes fell back to a small hill in the plain a few hundred yards from their original position, cut off by the Turkish cavalry from further retreat.
Here the dream of the philhellene volunteers that they might play a noble part in the liberation of Greece came to an end. Their commander Dania was killed in hand-to-hand fighting, their standard bearer died still holding the battalion’s flag, and, with the casualties from earlier in the battle, sixty-seven philhellenes are known to have died at Péta. Tarella and virtually all the European officers of the regular regiment were killed, though Tarella’s lieutenant Gubernatis survived the battle and succeeded Tarella as the regiment’s commander. Raybaud would probably have been among the dead if he had not been in Mesolongi that day, on a mission from Mavrokordhátos to secure supplies and more cannon. Perhaps Mavrokordhátos wanted to keep out of harm’s way the faithful companion who had been with him since they left Marseille together a year before. Of the philhellene dead, thirty-four were German, twelve Italian, nine Polish, seven native or naturalised French, three Swiss, one Dutch and one Hungarian. Fewer than thirty philhellenes got away from the hill where most of their comrades died, and with the Turks in pursuit fled through the ravines and undergrowth of the nearby mountains. In a final twist on a day when support given or withheld swung the battle and determined who lived and who died, this small band was saved by a sudden outbreak of shots from the heights above them, covering fire provided by the troops of Bakólas.
Was Bakólas then a traitor? The surviving Europeans were convinced that he had thrown the battle to the Turks by leaving his position undefended according to a prearranged plan. They were deeply suspicious of his earlier communications with the Turks which had secured him such generous supplies. Three days after the battle Bakólas openly joined the Turks and remained with them until he died the next year. What further proof of his bad faith was needed? Others were not so certain. Bakólas himself claimed that he was simply extracting provisions from the Turks and would sooner or later lead them into a trap, an explanation which Mavrokordhátos accepted. Bakólas’ crucial withdrawal from his position might simply have been a mistake made because he believed he had repelled the Turkish attack; Gordon stated even-handedly that his action could have been due either to ‘the blackest treachery’ or to ‘one of those chances which exercise such an influence over the fate of battles’.3 Bakólas’ troops provided cover for the escaping philhellenes. Apologists for Bakólas also point out that he presented himself with the other captains at Mavrokordhátos’ camp on the day after the battle, still professing his loyalty to the Greek cause, a profession which Mavrokordhátos still accepted. On this view Bakólas went over to the Turks only because of the general distrust of him in the Greek camp.
The covering fire from Bakólas’ men at the end of the day may well have been spontaneous rather than under orders, so the case for Bakólas rests on two things: first, his own professions of his loyalty, which he would have made whether loyal or not, and second Mavrokordhátos’ support for him. But Mavrokordhátos too had motives for concealing his real thoughts. Before the battle he was trying to secure Bakólas’ loyalty by proclaiming his belief in that loyalty. After the battle Mavrokordhátos needed to present the outcome in the least damaging light, claiming a week later that his military venture had been useful in drawing part of the Turkish troops south and away from Soúli, but ‘had failed due to mistakes such as men often fall into’ and that the culminating battle of Péta ‘while it certainly brought us some gain was lost only because of a trivial occurrence’.4 This was blatant whitewash; as the contemporary politician and historian Spirídhon Trikoúpis wrote, ‘In a word, the outcome of Péta was not a defeat, it was a disaster.’5
Almost certainly therefore Bakólas was guilty of treachery, and brought about in a single day the deaths of more of his own side than most traitors encompass in a lifetime of deceit. His actions need to be seen in context. The chieftains of West Roumeli were used to co-operating with the Turks, as both they and their present opponent Omer Vrionis had seen common service under Ali Pasha, and Omer Vrionis himself had deserted Ali Pasha for the Turks. The strong Albanian elements in both Greek and Turkish forces made a change of sides less abrupt. Above all a Greek chieftain needed to hold on to his local territory and in the early days it was far from certain that Greek victory would secure it for him; to keep his base as a satrap of the Turks, at least temporarily, was better than to lose it altogether. Finally ostensible agreements with the Turks were sometimes actively encouraged: for example, later that summer Varnakiótis, one of the captains at Péta, was instructed by Mavrokordhátos to start pretended negotiations for submission to Omer Vrionis. Before long, Varnakiótis had actually joined the Turks, only returning to the Greek side in 1828 when Greek success was assured. But even in an era when loyalties were fluid there were degrees of treason. To change sides during a lull in military activity was less reprehensible than aiding the enemy in the course of a battle. To change sides when the Greeks were losing was not as bad as treacherously undermining a potential Greek success. If the detractors of Bakólas are right, then his action was of the last kind and was indeed the blackest treachery.
The aftermath of Péta was painful. Ten days after the battle twenty-five surviving philhellenes attended the funeral service in Mesolongi for their dead comrades. Their battalion was then formally disbanded, those who could left for home, and the sick and wounded remained in Mesolongi, most of them to die during the following winter. Normann, lightly wounded at Péta, died in Mesolongi at the end of November. The Souliots in their homeland, deprived of support, capitulated by agreement and many of them were evacuated to the Ionian islands. Mavrokordhátos fell back on Mesolongi, whose low mud walls and surrounding lagoon were now the only barrier between the western Turkish army and the Peloponnese. After Péta the flood of volunteers to fight for Greece slowed to a trickle – none except Byron and his party in 1823, perhaps seven in 1824, and never again as many as the 500 or so who arrived in 1821–2. The disaster at Péta might also have permanently discredited the whole idea of philhellenism had it not been revived by Turkish atrocities which stunned the world and were carried out during that summer on the island of Chios.