At the beginning of 1824 Greece had two governments, or at least two bodies which claimed to be the legitimate government of the country. One was the new Executive, led by Georgios Koundouriótis, and the senators who backed it, based at Kranídhi east of Navplion; the other was the old Executive with its supporting senators, based in Tripolis, and dominated by Kolokotrónis. Kolokotronis’ son Pános held Navplion for his father’s faction, and his persistent refusal to hand over that town to the new government made civil war between the two sides unavoidable. How should one label these two sides? In some accounts the opposing parties are called the Koundouriotists and the Kolokotronists, but this is to distort the conflict into one simply between two personal factions, and ducks the issue of which side had the greater claim to legitimacy. It was the Senate which had the constitutional right to appoint the Executive members, and there is no doubt that the balance of legitimacy rested overwhelmingly with the new Executive and the Senate which backed it. So the most fitting descriptions of the two sides are government and rebels.
There were in fact two civil wars in 1824 between government and rebels, of markedly different character. The first can be dated from Pános Kolokotrónis’ attack on the senators in Árgos in December 1823 and ended with his surrender of Navplion to the government in June 1824. In this war the participants on both sides were almost exclusively from the Peloponnese, Hydra and Spétses. The government side was dominated by islanders (Koundouriótis) and Peloponnesian landowning primates (Zaímis and Lóndos), the rebel side by Kolokotrónis and his sons and their fellow military captains. Somewhat surprising outsiders were Bulgarian mercenaries, including cavalry, employed by both sides.
Of the government’s military supporters many had personal reasons for opposing their natural allies, Kolokotrónis and his captains. Iatrákos had been criticised by Kolokotrónis for his conduct at Dhervenákia; Makriyánnis served with Kolokotrónis’ son Yennéos in the early months of 1824, but disgust at Yennéos’ rapacity soon drove him to join the government side; Mourtsínos, in whose house Kolokotrónis had stayed on arrival in the Peloponnese in early 1821, was a rival of the Mavromichális clan, and therefore opposed to the old Executive of which Petrobey Mavromichális was president. On the rebel side, Kolokotrónis was backed by many of his old comrades in arms, most of them part of his immediate or extended family. Among them were two of his sons Pános and Yennéos, and his nephew Nikítas, who at Dhervenákia had earned the nickname of ‘Tourkophágos’. Some stood aside from the conflict. Sisínis, the wealthy primate of Gastoúni in the north-west Peloponnese, managed to remain neutral until the end of the second civil war though his sympathies lay with his natural allies, the primates Zaímis and Lóndos. Dhimítrios Ipsilántis, now living as a private citizen, tried to reconcile the two sides but failed. Mavrokordhátos stayed in Mesolongi, encouraged to do so by his brother-in-law Trikoúpis, who wrote from the Peloponnese, ‘Stay where you are, brother, and unless I write for you to come here, don’t come, but attend to the interests of your own region.’1 In the event Mavrokordhátos stayed in Mesolongi for the rest of 1824, and thus held aloof from the government throughout both civil wars.
By Pános Kolokotrónis’ attack on the senators at Árgos in the previous December the rebels had thrown down the gauntlet. After three months of simmering delay the government picked it up on 14 March 1824 by proclaiming Navplion as the seat of government and a week later calling on Pános Kolokotrónis to hand the town over to them. The government’s determination to occupy Navplion was underlined by the arrival of the members of both the Senate and the new Executive, on two ships commanded by Miaoúlis of Hydra, at Míli five miles from Navplion across the bay.
However, the government did not move immediately on Navplion but first secured easier objectives. On 25 March the government forces entered Árgos without resistance, and that stronghold again became for a few months the seat of the Senate. A week later the rebel forces in the citadel of Corinth surrendered it to the government without a shot. At the beginning of April the government forces under Andréas Lóndos moved on Tripolis, the seat of the rebel government defended by Kolokotrónis and his supporters. There was a day of skirmishing under the walls of the town. ‘Many people reasonably feared’, wrote Trikoúpis, ‘that a hundred men would fall in the battle, but that day of clashes produced only one casualty, since the troops had no inclination to spill a brother’s blood.’2 Some days later the two sides reached an agreement, the rebels left Tripolis unhindered and by mid-April the government was in possession of the town.
The rebels had now lost three of their four citadels – Árgos, Corinth and Tripolis – but still retained Navplion and were not yet prepared to give up. Kolokotrónis, after leaving Tripolis, withdrew to Karítena twenty miles to the west, and there recruited within days a force with which he returned to Tripolis to besiege the former besiegers. Meanwhile rebel troops from Tripolis under Yennéos Kolokotrónis took the offensive against the government. This force did not move directly towards the government positions in Árgos and Míli, but advanced in a long loop behind the mountains to the north and then to the east and south. In clashes with government forces casualties were light – twenty reportedly killed or wounded on the rebel side, eight on the government side – and no decisive advantage was gained by either. The rebel forces tried to capture Míli opposite Navplion, the harbour for Miaoúlis’ ships on which the Senate and Executive were temporarily based, and repeated Pános Kolokotrónis’ attempt to capture the senators reinstalled in Árgos. Both efforts failed.
The government had succeeded in holding off the rebel offensive and now took the initiative, sending troops at the end of May to disperse Kolokotrónis’ forces besieging Tripolis. Kolokotrónis was by this time ready to surrender on terms, and on 3 June agreed to order the surrender of Navplion on two conditions: that the town be formally handed over to Lóndos and Zaímis, his fellow Peloponnesians, rather than to the government and that the government should give 25,000 piastres to Pános Kolokotrónis to cover the back pay of his Navplion troops. There were no punitive clauses in the agreement, which only required Kolokotrónis’ forces to disperse.
The Executive regarded these terms as far too lenient but did not reject the deal because it achieved the government’s primary aim, possession of Navplion. The Senate was far more conciliatory, and endorsed the agreement to bring the fighting to an end. On 22 June the senators moved from Árgos to Navplion, and were joined two days later by the Executive in a triumphal entry as guns fired in salute from the heights of Akronavplion and Palamídhi, now firmly in government hands. On 14 July the first civil war was brought to an end by a general amnesty. ‘It seemed’, wrote Trikoúpis, ‘that the situation was peaceful and, in the words of the Senate, under the rule of law. But the laws did not rule, and the Peloponnese did not remain at peace.’3
That the peace was fragile was in fact obvious. The government had not won the clear-cut victory which it sought, and now found its two leading captains, Lóndos and Zaímis, in sympathy with the defeated enemy. Gordon summed up the position of Lóndos and Zaímis: ‘As great Peloponnesian primates, and consequently Kolokotrónis’ rivals, they willingly assisted in pulling him down, but it did not suit their policy to crush him entirely, because they foresaw, that at a future period he might be useful in withstanding the preponderating influence of the islanders.’4 Rebuffs to the two Andréases followed the end of hostilities: the government refused to pay them for their past services, and control of Navplion was quickly taken out of their hands, the Bulgarian Hadzí Chrístos being appointed garrison commander. Also the government’s financial position was about to be strengthened. In June it had had considerable difficulty in raising the 25,000 piastres, equivalent to £500, which was the price of the surrender of Navplion; at the beginning of August the first instalment of the English loan, long delayed at Zákinthos, was in the government’s hands.
On 1 August that first instalment, £40,000, reached the government in Navplion, and a further £40,000 arrived at the end of the month. This transformed the government’s position. ‘There prevailed at Nauplia’, wrote Gordon, ‘a continual bustle, civil and military adventurers, scribes, and parasites flocking thither, heaping adulation on the men in office, and gaping to catch some drops of the golden shower that was at their disposal.’5 Much of this golden shower ran to waste, and Finlay’s seething indignation at the way he saw his country’s contribution to the Greek cause as being misused still leaps off the page. ‘Fireships were purchased and fitted out at an unnecessary expense,’ he wrote, ‘because their proprietors wished to dispose of useless vessels.’ The military captains drew pay and rations from the government for even larger numbers of non-existent soldiers than before. ‘No inconsiderable amount’, Finlay went on, ‘was divided among the members of the legislative assembly, and among a large body of useless partisans, who were characterized as public officials.’ The signs of this new affluence were everywhere visible, and in Navplion the expenditure was especially frivolous. ‘Phanariots and doctors in medicine, who, in the month of April 1824, were clad in ragged coats, and who lived on scanty rations, threw off that patriotic chrysalis before summer was past, and emerged in all the splendour of brigand life, fluttering about in rich Albanian habiliments, refulgent with brilliant and unused arms, and followed by diminutive pipe-bearers and tall henchmen.’6 Thus to the catalogue of contemporary animal analogies – the Sultan as mole, tortoise or scorpion, Mavrokordhátos as hedgehog – Finlay added that of the butterfly Greek. But despite this wastage the government now had far more money than before to use against its opponents.
By the time the first civil war ended in mid-summer of 1824 it was clear that the government had lost the support of many of the Peloponnesian captains, especially that of the two Andréases, Lóndos and Zaímis. The government now tried to marginalise them, and in late July despatched to the continuing siege of Patras, well away from Navplion, a force led by Lóndos and including troops under Zaímis and Kolokotrónis’ sons Pános and Yennéos. This was perfectly justifiable as a strategic move but the government’s underlying motives soon became clear. After the first month Lóndos’ adjutant, believed to be a spy in the pay of Koléttis, refused to provide the troops with either pay or rations. By the beginning of October the Peloponnesian captains were in no doubt of their position, Zaímis writing to Lóndos that ‘the islanders, for their own ends, are seeking the elimination of any Peloponnesians with persuasive powers and influence’.7
As well as marginalising its opponents, the government was anxious to strengthen its own legitimacy. Under the constitution of 1823, which was itself timeless, new elections to government office were to be held annually, and these were now overdue. The government’s opponents called repeatedly for a new national assembly, to revise the constitution and, they hoped, clip the government’s wings, but these appeals got nowhere. The sixty electors for government posts assembled in Navplion in October 1824, and broadly endorsed the status quo. Georgios Koundouriótis was re-elected president of the Executive, and Koléttis a member of it, with Mavrokordhátos in absentia as general secretary.
The government’s opponents were now in a far weaker position than they had been at the start of the first civil war. Then they had held four strongholds – Árgos, Corinth, Tripolis and Navplion; now they held none. Then the government had no money; now it had the English loan, to ensure the loyalty of its own troops and to pay mercenaries from outside the Peloponnese. ‘It is baffling’, wrote Trikoúpis, ‘why men such as the two Andréases and Kolokotrónis embarked on this struggle in the midst of such difficulties.’8 The reason, as Trikoúpis himself makes clear, was desperation: as Kolokotrónis and his supporters saw it, their influence, their wealth and indeed their lives were at stake.
The spark that ignited the second civil war was a call for resistance in late October 1824 from the people of Arkadhia, now Kiparíssia, in the south-west Peloponnese against government levies on their produce. The Executive, against some opposition from the far more placatory Senate, sent a force of 500 soldiers to deal with the malcontents, with Makriyánnis in command of the troops, and accompanied by Papaphléssas, now the minister for internal affairs, as a sort of political commissar. According to Makriyánnis, Papaphléssas brought with him ‘his playthings’, that is, a fiddle-player and a prostitute, a woman for whom he sought a replacement among the local population when she was left behind at his camp. Papaphléssas also undermined Makriyánnis’ military efforts, withholding ammunition and leading away some of his men. The government’s punitive expedition was short lived. Disaffected troops from the siege of Patras, enraged at the government’s treatment of them, marched under Kolokotrónis to support the rebel Arcadians, and after two weeks of ragged skirmishing Makriyánnis and Papaphléssas returned to Navplion in mid-November with nothing accomplished.
Within a week of their success in Arkadhía the rebels moved against Tripolis, which was held for the government by troops mainly from Roumeli. Days of skirmishing followed, in which sixty rebels were taken prisoner and the combined death toll was over one hundred. The most prominent casualty was Pános Kolokotrónis, killed in a battle a few miles outside the town. Contemporaries said that his father was devastated by this death, and perhaps at this point he lost heart for the struggle, though in his memoirs he only records laconically that ‘the soldiers came up with Pános, and he was killed’.9
The government now took steps to bring in more troops from Roumeli to crush the rebels completely. The government was effectively in the hands of Koléttis, to whom his colleagues on the Executive had delegated the direction of the war while their president Koundouriótis was away ill in Hydra. Koléttis’ approach to the Roumeliots was brutally straightforward. He offered them money from the loan and the plunder of the Peloponnese, and by early December Roumeliot troops under a host of captains, of whom the most prominent was the Athens commander Goúras, were pouring into the Peloponnese.
The rebels were now effectively finished, but made one last attempt to take the fight closer to the seat of government at Navplion, a force under Lóndos laying siege to the citadel of Corinth. This was soon abandoned, and the rebels suffered a string of defeats in the villages and mountains of the north-east Peloponnese. Zaímis and Lóndos fled to the protection of Mavrokordhátos in Mesolongi. Retribution spread even to those who had played no active part in the rebellion but had sympathised with it: Sisínis, the rich primate of Gastóuni who had played the neutral, found his family stronghold sacked by Goúras’ troops, and after being refused sanctuary on Zákinthos put himself in the government’s hands. So too on 11 February 1825 did Kolokotrónis, followed soon after by twelve of his leading captains. A month later Kolokotrónis, his twelve supporters and Sisínis were shipped to Hydra and imprisoned in the fortified monastery of the Prophet Elijah on the heights above the harbour. The government’s victory was complete.
Gordon wrote sadly of the effect of the second civil war on the Peloponnese. ‘Its prosperity was nipped in the bud by the licentiousness of the northern soldiery, who, however reluctant to kill their countrymen, had no scruples about pillage; and not content with plundering the rich properties of Sisini, Zaímis, &c., robbed all classes without distinction.’10 Makriyánnis was appalled by the pillaging and dealt fiercely with a group of his men who were guilty of it. He had four of them thrown on the ground and held asprawl, and thrashed all of them in turn till the blood flowed from their buttocks:
I was worse off than they; my hands were bleeding and I was sick for many days after. Then I had them wrapped in raw sheepskins, gave them a month’s pay and gave them free passes. I left them in the village to be tended to till their recovery. I tell you, brother readers, from that time on I never came across a dishonourable or a thievish man in my troop and wherever any of my men went they were welcomed by the country folk like their brothers.11
Restraining his troops from brutality was one of the major problems for Makriyánnis as a man of conscience. The other was which side to support in the civil strife. He had served with Odysseus Andhroútsos and Goúras in 1822–3, but had left them in disgust at the mismanagement and cruelty of Goúras as commander in Athens. He had then supported Yennéos Kolokotrónis, but had again left disillusioned. He had finally come to the conclusion that though he had a low opinion of many of the leading figures on the government side – for him Goúras was a robber, Papaphléssas an untrustworthy playboy, and Koléttis a deceitful intriguer – he must support the legitimate government whatever its composition. But he would support it only in fighting the Turks; at the end of 1824 he told the government, ‘I’m listening to no more orders for a civil war.’12 These conflicts of loyalty were soon to be harshly resolved by enforced unity against the invasion from the south of Ibrahim Pasha.