By the beginning of 1824 the Turks had achieved virtually nothing in three years of land warfare. In 1821 they had lost some of their fortresses, including the all-important Tripolis in the heart of the Peloponnese, and were bottled up in those which they still held. In 1822 Dramali had been comprehensively defeated after crossing into the Peloponnese by the isthmus of Corinth at the eastern end of the Gulf of Corinth, and in 1823 Ottoman forces at the western end had failed to land a single Turkish soldier in the Peloponnese. To try Dramali’s Corinth route again would be putting the burnt hand back into the fire, and any western expedition was under threat from Mesolongi, still unsubdued. At sea the Turks had done little better; they had achieved no convincing successes, and had lost a number of their best fighting vessels to Greek fireships. It was imperative that the Sultan devised a new strategy.
The key to this was the involvement of the Sultan’s most powerful viceroy, Mehmed Ali, pasha of Egypt for the previous twenty years. In that time Mehmed Ali had imposed root-and-branch reforms on Egypt which had transformed the country. Agriculture and irrigation were improved with the help of foreign experts, and new crops were introduced – cotton, sugar, rice, indigo. Taxes were raised sharply and state collectors, not tax farmers, travelled along Mehmed’s new roads to raise state revenue far more efficiently than before. But Mehmed’s main innovation was the creation of a modern army and navy. During the Napoleonic wars he had fought against both French and British and been impressed by the superiority of European military systems over traditional Ottoman methods. He had therefore brought in hundreds of officers and technical experts from Europe, mainly France, set up military schools to train Egyptians, and opened military factories. His partner in these drastic and highly successful reforms was his son, Ibrahim Pasha. The new strategy was to bring a large Egyptian force into the Peloponnese by sea, and the inducement to the Egyptians to co-operate was the promise to Ibrahim of the pashalik of the Morea – once he had conquered it.
Egyptian troops had already demonstrated their effectiveness against the insurgents in Crete, and by April 1824 had crushed the rebellion there. The Sultan’s new plan required not just the subjection of Crete as a stepping stone between Egypt and the Peloponnese but command of the whole of the Aegean. The first objective was the destruction of the island of Kásos, thirty miles off the north-east tip of Crete, whose ships had harassed the Egyptian forces throughout the Cretan campaigns. In June 1824 it fell to an Egyptian force sailing out from Crete under its admiral Ismael Gibraltar, while Hussein Bey commanded the troops. The next step was the elimination of the islands where Greek naval forces were concentrated: first the easiest target of Psará, small and isolated, which was sacked a month later by a Turkish fleet under the kapitan pasha Khosref. The next objectives were Hydra and Spétses, though in the event the Sultan never managed to assemble sufficient forces to tackle these more formidable opponents. A subsidiary part of the strategy was the reduction of the still rebellious Sámos.
At both Kásos and Psará the Greek fleets of Hydra and Spétses arrived too late to be any help, and Gordon levelled at them the accusation of Demosthenes from an earlier conflict: ‘You run about wherever the enemy chooses to lead you, and, like unskilful boxers, can neither foresee nor guard against a blow until you feel that it is struck!’1 But in early August the Greeks made up for their earlier ineffectiveness at sea, when a fleet under Andréas Miaoúlis, from Hydra and Spétses and with the surviving ships of Psará, set sail across the Aegean to block the Turkish fleet’s next objective, the reduction of Sámos. They successfully did so and the Turkish kapitan pasha withdrew to Bodrum to join forces with the Egyptian fleet awaited from Alexandria.
This Egyptian fleet was a huge armada, the largest seen in the eastern Mediterranean since Napoleon invaded Egypt twenty-five years earlier. It comprised fifty-four fighting ships and a vast assembly of transport vessels carrying 14,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry with their horses, and 500 gunners in charge of 150 cannon, the whole fleet amounting to nearly 400 ships. In command was the Egyptian viceroy’s son Ibrahim Pasha, and subordinate to him Ismael Gibraltar and Hussein Bey, the victors of Kásos. The fleet left Alexandria on 19 July, and its task was to join up with the Turkish fleet and invade the Peloponnese by sea that summer.
At the end of August the Turkish and Egyptian fleets met at Bodrum as planned, but got no further. The combined Greek fleet, now seventy ships and some 5,000 men, was waiting for them. On 10 September the major sea battle of the year was fought in the open waters north of the Bodrum peninsula off Cape Yérondas. Though this battle was no more decisive than a draw, it was enough to persuade Ibrahim Pasha that he could not invade the Peloponnese that year. In October the Turkish fleet returned to Constantinople, by the end of November the Greeks were back in their home ports, and in December Ibrahim Pasha brought his fleet into Crete’s Suda Bay to shelter and refit.
The naval campaign of 1824 was, in Gordon’s view, ‘the most glorious to the Hellenic arms’ of the whole war, but it was far from a total success. The Greeks had thwarted the attack on Sámos, but had failed to defend Kásos and Psará, and Psará was a particular loss because its position had enabled it to give early warning of Turkish fleets sailing out of the Dardanelles; it was an eye of Greece, now put out. With the expenditure of twenty-one fireships the Greeks had destroyed six Ottoman warships with the loss of all hands. But, as that success ratio suggests, the fireship was no longer the all-conquering weapon of earlier years. The Turks were keeping better watch, so the Greeks stopped using fireships at night, when any movement on quiet water was easily detectable. In daylight the Turks would launch small boats to drive off an approaching fireship, and if it got close were ready to fend it off from their hull. Many unsuitable vessels may have been converted to fireships, as Finlay suspected. Also the fireship crews were no longer the fearless operators of before, and in the 1824 campaign there were several occasions when the bruloteers refused to move, even when offered 100 piastres as an incentive. Each fireship needed at least two dozen seamen as well as the captain, and probably there were simply not enough daredevils to fill the ranks.
Since traditionally ships stayed in port for the winter it seemed that any further invasion attempt would have to wait for the spring. However at the end of the year Ibrahim Pasha fell in with Captain Drouault, commander of a French frigate, who had instructions to cooperate with the Egyptians and gave Ibrahim some revealing advice. Forget Sámos, Hydra and Spétses for the moment, said Drouault, and concentrate on pouring troops into one of the three Peloponnesian fortresses in Turkish hands, Patras, Koróni or Methóni. Methóni, besides being extensive and well fortified, gives directly on to the shore, and so was the obvious choice. Drouault went on to point out that winter was not a setback for Ibrahim’s fleet but an opportunity. In summer calms Ibrahim’s heavy vessels drifted apart from each other and became isolated targets for fireships. The winds of winter gave his ships manoeuvrability but were too strong for the lighter, faster Greek fleet. In short, Drouault was saying that the proverbial General Winter, who had been vital in the Russians’ defeat of Napoleon in 1812, could now be Ibrahim’s ally against the Greeks. Ibrahim took his advice.
On 23 and 24 February 1825, ‘days pregnant with sorrow to Peloponnesus’ as Gordon wrote, Ibrahim Pasha’s fleet of over fifty fighting ships and transports completed its crossing from Crete to Methóni. Some 4,000 infantry and 400 cavalry disembarked and moved into the citadel or into the camp of 400 tents that was set up on the level ground under the protection of its walls. Methóni is the most impressive of the castles left in the Peloponnese by the Venetians. Built on a promontory jutting out southwards from the coast for almost half a mile, it is protected by the sea on three sides and by a moat on the fourth. Its walls thirty-five feet high, with parapets up to fifteen feet deep and all the defensive elaboration of glacis, scarp, counterscarp and bastion, enclose a space that would accommodate half a dozen football pitches. For the Venetians, who had occupied the Peloponnese intermittently from the twelfth century until finally driven out by the Turks in 1715, Methóni was a vital staging post for journeys to Crete, Egypt, Syria, Constantinople and beyond Constantinople to the trade routes of Asia, ‘halfway’, it was said, ‘to every land and sea’. Hence such a massive and sophisticated structure in such an isolated spot. Within days the army from Egypt had seized the town of Koróni only fifteen miles away, which the Greeks did not attempt to defend, and secured Koróni’s fortress. Three weeks after the first landing another 7,000 troops reached Methóni from Crete, and by the end of March Ibrahim Pasha’s forces were ready to move against the two Greek-held fortresses of Old and New Navarino.
Up to this point the Greeks, distracted by civil war, had done nothing to resist Ibrahim Pasha or even to prepare to resist him, though they had known for some months that Navarino would be his target. Insofar as the Greeks considered an Egyptian invasion in the south they expected it not to happen in winter, and to be easily defeated if it came. ‘We will dig their graves with their own bayonets,’2 said the Greek soldiers, and their friends jokingly asked them to bring back an Arab as a slave. The Greeks were scarcely more impressed when they first saw Ibrahim’s troops. They were plainly dressed in red cloth jacket, trousers and skull-cap, in contrast to the glittering apparel sported by many of the Greeks thanks to the English loan. Besides this the Arabs were short and puny-looking, and many had lost an eye from Egypt’s endemic eye diseases. But appearances were deceptive; the Arab soldiers were very obedient, quick to learn military manoeuvres which they practised constantly, and extremely hardy, and they had a formidable commander in Ibrahim Pasha.
He too scarcely looked the part. Philip Green described him as ‘of middling stature, rather fat, marked with the small-pox, has a reddish beard, and is on the whole not a goodlooking man: he evidently has an excellent opinion of himself, the natural consequence of being surrounded by flatterers and slaves. He is, however, an active man compared with other Turks, and certainly manages, one way or other, to carry his plans into effect.’3 He lived in impressive splendour at his headquarters, but as simply as the meanest soldier when on operations. He was a fierce disciplinarian, personally cutting down any of his men who broke ranks, and a brutal enemy, as his branded captives shipped to Egypt as galley slaves could testify. On the other hand, he sought the reputation of a civilised prince, was prepared to show clemency when it suited his purpose, and was credited with adhering scrupulously to his word. Ibrahim’s army was tougher and better disciplined, and he himself more forceful and more subtle than any enemy the Greeks had so far faced.
The first Greek moves had an element of comedy. On 28 March, a full month after Ibrahim’s first landing, Koundouriótis, the president of the Executive, set out from Navplion to take command of the troops sent to the Navarino area. ‘The president departed from Nauplia with great pomp,’ wrote Finlay, ‘mounted on a richly-caparisoned horse, which he hung over as if he had been a sack of hay, supported by two grooms. His ungraceful exhibition of horsemanship was followed by a long train composed of secretaries, guards, grooms, and pipe-bearers.’4 His stock expression, ‘but on the other hand’, was laughed at as the mark of a ditherer. Reaching Tripolis after a leisurely three-day journey, Koundouriótis fell sick, and it was not until 17 April that he arrived within thirty miles of Navarino, which was as close as he got to the enemy. Koundouriótis was accompanied by Mavrokordhátos as his counsellor, and, unlike his president, Mavrokordhátos did proceed to the scene of action. A less fortunate appointment by Koundouriótis was that of a sea captain from Hydra, Kiriákos Skoúrtis, as field commander of the Greek forces, a man who knew nothing of land warfare. ‘They might as well have made me an admiral,’5 Kolokotrónis is said to have remarked, and Samuel Howe called Skoúrtis ‘a stupid old fool of a general who does nothing but drink and sleep day and night!’6
Ibrahim’s first aim was possession of the Bay of Navarino, only ten miles or so from Methóni and the finest harbour in the Peloponnese. The bay forms a horseshoe with an entrance at the south end, its western arm being the island of Sphaktiría, which is separated from the rest of the bay’s curve only by a narrow-silted up channel. For Ibrahim to succeed he needed to dislodge the Greeks from Sphaktiría and from the bay’s two fortresses of Old and New Navarino. Old Navarino, dating from the late thirteenth century, but already by 1825 an isolated ruin, crowns the steep cliffs at the northern end of the bay and overlooks the sandy lagoons below. New Navarino, built by the Turks in 1573 in the aftermath of the battle of Lepanto, lies at the south-east corner of the bay above the modern town of Pílos.
Ibrahim first eliminated the threat from the Greek land forces which had come south to oppose him. Some six or seven thousand under the inexperienced Skoúrtis had taken up defensive positions in the hills above the village of Kremmídhia a few miles inland from Navarino Bay, and on the morning of 19 April Ibrahim attacked with half that number but supported by 400 cavalry. The Greeks held out for some time, but eventually their centre broke and Ibrahim’s cavalry, galloping up a ravine thought to be impassable, attacked from the rear. Over 500 Greeks were killed and many were taken prisoner. Greek forces were further depleted when as a result of this defeat the men from Roumeli, who made up half the total, departed to protect their own homes and in disgust at the command given to Skoúrtis the sailor general. The days of the Greeks’ contemptuous mockery of Ibrahim’s Arabs were over, and the battle of Kremmídhia had established their superiority.
Ibrahim’s next objective was the island of Sphaktiría. It was held by some 800 Greeks and defended by eight Greek fighting ships in the bay, and to tackle these Ibrahim had to wait for his own fleet to return from its third voyage bringing troops from Crete to Methóni. On the morning of 8 May Mavrokordhátos was on board one of the Greek ships, the Ares, breakfasting with its captain, when an Egyptian fleet of thirty-four fighting ships plus troop transports was seen approaching the entrance to the bay. The Ares quickly crossed to Sphaktiría, where its captain and Mavrokordhátos landed, and the Egyptians immediately began a bombardment under cover of which fifty launches ferried their troops from the ships to the island. The Greek defenders were overwhelmed and within an hour Sphaktiría was in Egyptian hands. Seven of the eight Greek ships got out of the harbour, but the crew of the Ares waited anxiously for their captain to return. They learnt at last that he was dead and, with Mavrokordhátos on board after a last-minute escape, cut their cables and made for the harbour mouth. In a six-hour running battle, one ship against thirty-four, the Ares eventually got out of the bay and into the open sea. It was ‘an action which can scarcely be paralleled in history’, wrote Gordon, and was achieved with the loss of only two Greeks killed and seven wounded.
On the day after Ibrahim’s capture of Sphaktiría his troops made an assault on Old Navarino, bombarding it from ships in the bay, from Sphaktiría and from the landward side. The Greek defenders could no longer rely on the water and bread which had previously been ferried over from Sphaktiría, and they now lost possession of their one spring of fresh water. Without provisions, having no artillery, almost out of cartridges and with their ramparts little more than a heap of loose stones, the Greeks’ capitulation was inevitable. On 10 May the garrison surrendered and, Ibrahim being in clement vein, they suffered no worse fate than being sent away without money or weapons.
The Greeks’ last outpost was New Navarino, the fortress at the mouth of the bay next to the town. Among the defenders was Makriyánnis and his troop of a hundred or so men, and Makriyánnis found New Navarino in scarcely better shape than Old Navarino: ‘the fort was rotten and falling to bits’. New Navarino had a garrison of some 1,500 men, most of them rushed in after Ibrahim’s landing, and forty pieces of artillery, but gunpowder was short and water was the most pressing problem. The Venetian aqueduct supplying the fort had been immediately cut off by the enemy, so the garrison had to rely on the water in three cisterns. Makriyánnis sealed the one which supplied his troop and distributed the water himself, at first half a pint a day and later only half that. However his men found a way round his precautions, as soldiers habitually do, and bored a tiny hole in the cover to let in a long thin reed through which they could slake their thirst at night. Makriyánnis was furious that his compatriots, only ten miles away and with, he believed, 16,000 men, did nothing to help the defenders of New Navarino. The garrison’s situation was hopeless, and on 18 May, only a week after the fall of Old Navarino, Makriyánnis and two other captains were in Ibrahim’s tent negotiating a surrender. Within a fortnight Ibrahim had taken Sphaktiría and Old and New Navarino; the Greeks had paid dearly for their failure to reinforce and provision them.
Europeans figured on both sides in the fighting around Navarino. On Ibrahim’s side one of the senior commanders was a veteran of Napoleon’s campaigns, Colonel Sève, now converted to Islam and called Suleiman Bey. The Italian Gubernatis, a professional mercenary, had fought with the Greeks at Péta but was now in the Egyptian army. Julius Millingen, physician to Byron and to Makriyánnis’ men in the defence of New Navarino, accepted Ibrahim’s offer of service, changed his name to Osman Bey, and spent the rest of his life in Constantinople as doctor to five sultans. On the Greek side, the most distinguished of the Italian philhellenes Santa Rosa, disappointed of high rank or office in Greece, served as a common soldier on Sphaktiría and was killed there. The American George Jarvis, now every inch a captain of Greek irregulars, helped garrison Old Navarino, and proudly rejected Ibrahim’s offer of service after the fortress fell.
Throughout the fighting round Navarino Howe was in the area as surgeon to the Greek forces. He had no pay from the government and supported himself haphazardly by private practice, letting his patients pay as they chose. He had plenty of work. ‘I will venture to say’, he wrote in his journal, ‘that I shall perform more surgical operations in one year than any surgeon in Boston, except at the hospital,’7 and so it turned out. Some of Howe’s operations were battle casualties – removal of bullets, treating wounds from the bursting of guns, amputation of part of a hand – conventional though ghastly enough in pre-anaesthetic days. Other duties were less expected: tending a Greek shepherd shot by marauding Greek troops while defending his sheep from them, treating some Greek soldiers whipped for stealing cartridges, and attending a Greek captain’s beautiful young Turkish mistress, of whom Howe wrote light-heartedly, ‘her confusion and partial undress made her the more interesting, and entirely destroyed my equilibrium’.8 Howe’s job was made far more difficult by opposition from incompetent Greek doctors. One, to preserve his own monopoly, arranged that Howe’s box of medicines should be left behind, and another insisted against Howe’s protests on making a huge incision to cure what was no more than a bruise. A third refused to allow a mortally wounded patient of Howe’s a decent place in the makeshift ward. He and Howe got into a fist fight – ‘with one blow I sent him staggering across the room’ – which almost became a pistol fight, but Howe got his way, and as so often after ferocious Greek arguments the doctor ‘gradually grew cool, and in two hours was as polite to me as possible’.9
From his experiences at Navarino and elsewhere Howe summarised the qualities of a Greek fighter in a warts-and-all but respectful description:
A Greek soldier is intelligent, active, hardy, and frugal; he will march, or rather skip, all day among the rocks, expecting no other food than a biscuit and a few olives, or a raw onion; and at night, lies down content upon the ground, with a flat stone for a pillow, and with only his capote, which he carries with him winter and summer, for covering; baggage-wagon and tent he knows nothing of. But, he will not work, for he thinks it disgraceful; he will submit to no discipline, for he thinks it makes a slave of him; he will obey no order which does not seem to him a good one, for he holds that in these matters he has a right to be consulted. In a European army, a body of Greeks would be called cowards. They never can be brought to enter a breach, to charge an enemy who has a wall before him, or to stand up and expose themselves to a fire. The invariable practice is to conceal their bodies behind a wall, or a rock, and fire from under cover. They wear pistols, but never come within reasonable distance to use them; they have yataghans, but the only service they are of is to cut off the head of a slain enemy. As an army, then, and compared to Europeans and Americans, they are not brave; but it may be doubted whether Europeans or Americans, in the same situation, would be any braver.10
After the fall of New Navarino, Ibrahim’s forces immediately fanned out northwards on their campaign to subjugate the Peloponnese. Ibrahim was acting on the old military maxim that a success is doubled if it is followed up at once, and he took care not to repeat Dramali’s mistake of leaving unguarded positions to the rear. The Greek cause was now in extreme danger, and the government embarked on a flurry of measures to meet it.
On 30 May, a week after the fall of New Navarino, the government amnestied all who had fought against it in the civil wars. Kolokotrónis and his companions were released from prison on Hydra, all the rebel leaders attended a service of reconciliation at Navplion in the church of Áyios Nikólaos just back from the harbour, and Kolokotrónis was immediately appointed commander-in-chief of the Greek forces. May also saw another government move, the imposition of conscription to a regular force to be commanded by the French philhellene Colonel Fabvier. Every district in Greece was to provide each year, for every hundred inhabitants, one conscript to serve for three years, and as Greece was reckoned to have 700,000 inhabitants this should in theory have provided a regular army of 21,000 men. Of course it did not: many ravaged districts were quite unable to provide recruits, and most were unwilling to do so, believing that the traditional guerrilla tactics of klephtic fighting were best.
Kolokotrónis and the other amnestied captains and their men could do little more to help the Greek war effort than harass Ibrahim’s troops as they advanced from their secure bases at Methóni, Koróni and Navarino. Kolokotrónis’ strategic aim was to deny Ibrahim possession of Tripolis, which he still regarded as the key to control of the Peloponnese. It was clear that the Greeks could not hold it, so Kolokotrónis proposed to wreck it. ‘If we destroy Tripolis,’ he told the government, ‘Ibrahim will find no other nest, and I with my armies will drive him out of the Peloponnese.’11 But he got no support, and when in June on his own initiative he ordered the burning of the town, it was just too late. Ibrahim’s troops arrived in time to extinguish the first flames, found the walls and the citadel intact, and occupied the town.
While on land the Greeks reeled back under Ibrahim’s attack, at sea they took the initiative. In May Miaoúlis sailed into the thick of Ibrahim’s fleet at Methóni with six fireships, and proved that they were still effective by burning seven of the Egyptian warships and a dozen other vessels. A brilliant achievement, the Greeks claimed, while Ibrahim dismissed it as not interrupting his operations for a single hour, and probably both were right: it was a tactical success but of no long-term importance. In August a Greek fleet under Kánaris attempted an even bolder exploit: to destroy by fireship the Egyptian fleet in its own home port of Alexandria. The Greek ships got into the harbour unmolested by flying the neutral flags of Russia, Austria or the Ionian islands, a practice not considered dishonourable in that era. But once inside the harbour the Greeks’ luck deserted them. The wind changed, the one fireship that was set alight drifted away uselessly, and the rest of the Greek fleet, their identity now revealed, could only escape perilously through a shower of cannon balls. ‘Such, such are the few men who redeem the Grecian character,’ wrote Howe of the Greeks at Alexandria, ‘they shine like diamonds among filth; they are brave, disinterested, enlightened patriots, who are willing and ready to die for their country. Oh, it delights me to think of it.’12 But for all their boldness they had in fact achieved nothing.
In the land war however the Greeks did achieve one success against Ibrahim which was probably crucial to their survival. This was in June at Míli, or Mills, on the bay opposite Navplion, known as the Mills of Lerna because it was close to the spot where legend says Hercules killed the many-headed monster Hydra, and so a marvellously appropriate place for a few Greeks to confront a mighty enemy. The Mills were vital because they held the main stores of grain and ammunition for Navplion, and because the stream that turned the mill wheels also supplied Navplion with water, its own cisterns having been allowed to deteriorate. The Greek captains defending the Mills were a son of Petrobey Mavromichális, Dhimítrios Ipsilántis who honourably joined the defence on his own initiative, and Makriyánnis who was determined to compensate for the Greek failure at New Navarino. Makriyánnis wrote an account of the battle which portrays him, perhaps with some exaggeration, as the main protagonist.
According to him, he first spent several days preparing the mill’s buildings for defence, extending the walls, and directing the mill stream to flow underground into the enclosure. He then got rid of the two possible means of escape: the horses, which he persuaded his fellow commanders to send to Navplion because they could always escape by the caiques, and the caiques by secretly ordering the crews to sail them away while the soldiers were asleep.
The Egyptian attack came on the evening of 25 June when the midday heat was over, and was watched by Ibrahim himself from an old fort on the heights above. The Egyptians on their first charge got into the enclosure and a fierce gun battle followed; ‘the smoke from the muskets was like a mist, a fog’, wrote Makriyánnis. Finally the Greeks hit on the tactic of concentrating their fire on the officers. The enemy morale slumped, and the Greeks rushed on them with their swords, one of the war’s rare examples of hand-to-hand combat. The Egyptians withdrew, leaving perhaps fifty dead. Greek losses were very few, but among the wounded was Makriyánnis, shot in the arm in the last stages of the battle. He was taken for treatment aboard a French frigate commanded by de Rigny, two years later to be French admiral at Navarino.
After his repulse at Míli Ibrahim did not attack Navplion, probably for a mixture of reasons. He would not want to stay to be harassed by troops of the quality of the defenders of Míli; he did not know how weak Navplion’s defences were; and the fortress of Palamídhi above the town would be very difficult to take except by a long siege. Navplion, the seat of the Greek government, was saved, and it is probably fair to say that the defenders of Míli saved it. Had Navplion fallen and the government been driven from the Peloponnese, at best to one of the naval islands and at worst to Turk-dominated Roumeli, it is doubtful if its influence at home, and just as important its support from abroad, could have survived.
By the end of the year, the major towns of the Peloponnese – Kalamáta, Árgos, Mistrás, Gastoúni – were occupied or sacked and, apart from Navplion and the isolated fortress of Monemvasía, Ibrahim was master of the whole area. He had mastered it, but did not actually control it; as the British Captain Hamilton remarked, Ibrahim marched where he pleased but ruled only where he was. The Greeks had lost several of their leading figures. The old warrior Anagnostarás was killed at Sphaktiría, and the firebrand Papaphléssas met his death in June after a nine-hour battle in the south-west Peloponnese: ‘a glorious death’, wrote Gordon, of a man whom he described as courageous, good-tempered and generous, and at the same time vain, prodigal and dissipated.13
Ibrahim’s troops certainly did great damage in the Peloponnese, and some observers were convinced that he intended to make it a waste land. The English traveller the Rev. Charles Swan met Ibrahim, and reported him as saying that he ‘would burn and destroy the whole Morea’, though Gordon commented that it was pointless for Ibrahim to destroy wantonly ‘the principal wealth of a province he hoped soon to possess’. But before the end of the year there was an even more alarming report that Ibrahim intended to remove the whole Greek population from the Peloponnese and to re-people the country with Egyptians. Britain’s foreign secretary Canning was horrified at what he described as Ibrahim’s barbarisation project, and wrote to the prime minister Lord Liverpool: ‘I begin to think that the time approaches when something must be done.’14 It is the common and humane reaction to the news of a barbarity to say ‘We must do something’ – with emphasis on any one of the four words. Canning was unusual among statesmen in finding a way to do something effective. From now on he actively sought, with other powers, for ways to intervene in the Greek conflict. Ibrahim had defeated the Greeks in the field, but his successes had secured for them allies with huge resources who would ultimately prove too powerful for him.