One of Austria’s consuls met Ibrahim at Mesolongi in February 1826 and reported on Ibrahim’s plans for the future. ‘As soon as Missolonghi has fallen,’ he wrote, ‘Ibrahim and the capitan Pasha will attack Hydra and then Nauplia by land and sea.’1 To seize these last Greek strongholds in the Peloponnese was the obvious next step for Ibrahim to complete his conquest. Why did he not take it?
Part of the reason was that he simply lacked the resources. Within weeks of the fall of Mesolongi the Egyptian ships of the fleet that had supported the besiegers were recalled by Mehmed Ali to their base in Alexandria, where they remained for the rest of the year, and because of the growing threat from Russia the Turkish contingent under the kapitan pasha Khosref went back to Constantinople. There was no naval attack on Hydra, and in fact no incentive for the Turkish fleet to make one. Ibrahim had been promised the Peloponnese if he could conquer it, and it was up to him to do so by his own efforts.
Ibrahim was also now much weaker on land. Some 5,000 of his troops had been lost at Mesolongi, and by the end of 1826 the 24,000 who had been brought over from Egypt were reduced to 8,000, of whom 1,500 were in hospital. During the summer of 1826 Ibrahim and his forces roamed the Peloponnese, from Corinth in the north to the Mani in the south and from Ástros on the east coast to Pírgos on the west, destroying villages and carrying off grain and livestock. Battles were usually little more than skirmishes, in which Ibrahim was successful on the plains, mainly thanks to his cavalry, but could not penetrate the hills where his men were at the mercy of Greek sharp-shooters and where the Arabs lost their footing on the slippery rocks. Gordon described Ibrahim’s 1826 campaign in the Peloponnese as fruitless marching and countermarching.
Moreover there was now the nagging question of what Ibrahim was to do with the Peloponnese once he had conquered it. The more he wrecked it, the less it was worth. When if ever would the defeated Greeks return to their shattered villages, rebuild them, make the land productive again, and submit to paying taxes to a hated overlord? As a solution to this problem there was a brutal logic to Ibrahim’s suspected barbarisation project of replacing the whole Greek population with Egyptians. But whatever the logic of this idea there would have been huge logistical problems in shipping tens of thousands of Greeks across 600 miles of sea to slavery in Egypt, and a similar number of Arabs in the other direction, bringing them from the sunny plains of Egypt to live and work in the harsh and rocky terrain of the Peloponnese. Also if Ibrahim started to implement this plan the powers of Europe would immediately intervene to stop it, as Canning’s response to reports of the barbarisation project had shown.
Besides this, the long-term value of the Peloponnese to Egypt had declined. In 1824, when the Sultan first sought help from Egypt, Ibrahim’s father Mehmed Ali could see the addition of the Peloponnese to his territory as strengthening his position within a continuing Ottoman empire. In 1826 that empire was showing signs of crumbling, and Mehmed Ali began to think of carving out an independent realm of his own from its remains. These ideas came to fruition a few years later, when Ibrahim seized the Ottoman province of Syria for Egypt in 1832. But meanwhile Mehmed Ali refused for the moment to keep his fleet in Greek waters or to commit a single extra soldier from Egypt to secure the rapidly tarnishing prize of the Peloponnese.
The problems which had so weakened the Ottoman empire by 1826 were both external and internal. From without, Russia threatened war. One of the first acts of the new Tsar Nicholas I was to issue an ultimatum to Turkey in February 1826, the principal terms of which were that all Turkish troops should be withdrawn from Moldavia and Wallachia, and that the two provinces should be governed in future by locally chosen boyars and not Ottoman appointees. The Turks prevaricated but Nicholas, the gendarme–tsar, insisted, and demanded a conference at Akkermann on the Black Sea, on his territory and not theirs, which, as Gordon said, ‘gave a fresh stab to Ottoman pride’. Turkey reluctantly accepted the ultimatum and signed the Convention of Akkermann in October 1826. The threat of a Russian war receded, only to return a year later when Turkey repudiated the Akkermann agreement and Russia did indeed declare war as a result.
The Sultan’s problem within his borders lay, as it had done before, with the corps of janissaries. They were now practically useless as a military force, and Mahmud had to fight his wars with mercenaries and with troops raised by local pashas. The janissary regiments in the provinces drew pay and rations in idleness, while those in the capital were an unruly menace, as a contemporary visitor described. ‘Lords of the day,’ he wrote,
they ruled with uncontrolled insolence in Constantinople, their appearance portraying the excess of libertinism; their foul language; their gross behaviour; their enormous turbans; their open vests; their bulky sashes filled with arms; their weighty sticks; rendering them objects of fear and disgust. Like moving columns, they thrust everybody from their path without any regard of age or sex, frequently bestowing durable marks of anger or contempt.2
In 1807 Mahmud’s predecessor Selim III had tried to bring the janissaries under control by incorporating them into his so-called Army of the New Order. The janissaries reacted violently, the new army was formally abolished and Selim lost his throne. In the following year, the first of Mahmud’s reign, his grand vizier publicly advocated reforming the janissaries and curbing their abuses, but lost his life in the ensuing janissary revolt.
Thereafter Mahmud proceeded cautiously. By increasing the privileges of the religious establishment he drew clerics away from their traditional support of the janissaries as the one truly Islamic force. He steadily built support within the janissaries by ousting senior officers and replacing them with younger men who supported reform, and appointed as commander of the janissaries an officer loyal to himself. In what has been described as ‘a concentrated propaganda campaign unequalled in Ottoman history’3 he constantly contrasted the successes of the Europeanised Egyptian forces with the failures of the unreformed Turkish army. After eighteen years of preparation the Sultan was ready to act.
At the end of May 1826 the Sultan announced his reforms. Each of the fifty janissary regiments was to provide 150 men for a new force, to be uniformed, armed and trained on Egyptian lines, Egyptian being a tactful synonym for European. The reform was backed by the religious authorities: ‘It is the religious duty of Muslims to learn military drill,’ proclaimed their spokesman.4 The first parade of the new troops was to be in the janissaries’ own barracks at At Meydani, near the Blue Mosque and within half a mile of the Sultan’s palace. The Sultan’s intent was clear: the Janissaries were to be emasculated to create the force which would replace them.
The first parade of the new troops was held on Monday 12 June 1826, and the reaction followed quickly. By Wednesday evening rebellious janissaries were gathering at their barracks, and on the following morning they formally overturned their cooking pots in the traditional renunciation of the Sultan’s rations and authority. They then barricaded the barrack gates. The Sultan, backed by the religious authorities, brought up his own loyal troops, whose cannon balls smashed open the gates and whose grapeshot slaughtered the janissaries inside the barracks. Within a few hours the janissary revolt in Constantinople had been crushed, and within a few days a reform needed for half a century or more had been initiated. In the following months the provincial janissaries were dissolved, and rebels in the capital brought to trials which ended in death sentences for thousands.
The destruction of the janissaries was indeed an Auspicious Event, as the Turks called it, since it deprived the Sultan’s reactionary opponents of their military force, and opened the way for him to reform not only the army and navy but every branch of Ottoman administration. But the Sultan’s reforms came too late to shift the balance in his favour in the conflict with the Greeks.
However there was one prize in Greece which the Sultan could still try to secure: the capture of Athens. Athens had been in the hands of the Greeks since their seizure of the Akropolis in 1822, and after the fall of Mesolongi it was the only remaining Greek stronghold north of the Gulf of Corinth. Athens was an enormously prestigious prize, as the birthplace of the glorious achievements of classical Greece, but it also had an immediate practical value. Some form of autonomy for Greece was by now probable, since the Greek struggle was still alive and the powers of Europe were clearly moving towards imposing a settlement. If the Turks held the whole of Roumeli any new Greek state would probably be limited to the Peloponnese, as Stratford Canning, Britain’s ambassador in Constantinople, made clear to the Greeks. Conversely, if the Greeks held Athens they could lay claim to a border further north.
Reshid Pasha had had to concede the honour of capturing Mesolongi to Ibrahim, or at least share it with him, and was now anxious for an unqualified military success of his own. By the end of June 1826, only two months after the fall of Mesolongi, Reshid had brought an army of some 7,000 men, including 800 cavalry, to Athens and had established his headquarters at Patíssia, north of the Akropolis. By the end of July his artillery was in place on the hill of Philópappos to bombard the south-west flank of the Akropolis. By mid-August Reshid was master of the town of Athens, though not of the Akropolis itself, which was held by a garrison of about 500 men under Goúras, now defending the place where he had encompassed the murder of his old rival Odysseus.
The Greeks’ first attempt to dislodge Reshid was an attack from the west by a combined force of Karaïskákis’ irregular troops and Fabvier’s regulars, numbering about 3,500 men. Karaïskákis the calculating guerrilla leader and Fabvier the correct French officer now met for the first time, and seemed to get on well together. On 18 August 1826 their substantial combined force reached Chaïdhári, five miles west of the Akropolis, but were driven back by Reshid’s troops and lost some 300 men. Karaïskákis and Fabvier each blamed the other for the defeat. ‘They criticised each other’s conduct with acrimony,’ wrote Gordon, ‘and their followers warmly took up the dispute…. any future cooperation became impossible.’5 It was the first of many disputes which were to bedevil the Greek campaign at Athens.
For the rest of the year the Akropolis remained under close siege and heavy bombardment. On 13 October the garrison commander Goúras was killed by a single sniper shot, and a week later Makriyánnis, serving with the garrison, was wounded three times on the same day, the last wound ‘an ugly cut on the back of my head: the shreds of my cap went into the bone to the skin over my brain. I fell down like one dead.’6 However a month later Makriyánnis was sufficiently recovered to get out with five horsemen through the enemy lines to the government at Éyina with a plea for help, especially for a supply of gunpowder. As a result Fabvier in mid-December landed at Piraeus with 500 of his regular troops, and under cover of darkness got past the Turkish guards and into the Akropolis, each man including Fabvier carrying some 26 lb of powder, a total amount of about six tons. Fabvier expected to leave the Akropolis once he had brought in his supply, and his men had not even brought their greatcoats, but the Greeks of the garrison wanted to escape and leave Fabvier’s regulars to take over the defence. They therefore started a skirmish to alert the Turks every time Fabvier tried to leave. Fabvier was now trapped in the Akropolis, and the year 1826 ended gloomily for the Greeks. Though they had managed to hold on to Navplion, Mesolongi’s long resistance had finally failed in April, and Athens was still under close Turkish siege.
In deciding their strategy for Athens the Greeks had two main options. One was to cut off Reshid’s supplies by attacking the chain of posts which he had prudently set up as links to Évvia in the north and the Gulf of Corinth to the west. This was favoured by Gordon, who was again serving with the Greek forces after a five-year absence, but was rejected in favour of the alternative, a direct attack on Reshid’s forces from the coast at Piraeus. Gordon was put in charge of this expedition, which was to be supported by a body of Greeks who were to attack from Elevsís in the west, and by Captain Hastings in the newly arrived steamship Kartería with two supporting ships. Gordon did not agree with the venture, which was, he wrote, ‘as much opposed to the rules of strategy as the dictates of good sense’.7 Nevertheless he accepted the command of it.
Gordon’s force of 2,300 men landed just east of Piraeus at midnight on 5 February 1827 and quickly occupied the high ground. The Turks meanwhile strengthened their defences and increased the Turkish and Albanian garrison of the monastery of Áyios Spirídhon immediately above the main harbour of Piraeus. This stronghold became the linchpin of their resistance, withstanding repeated cannonades from the Kartería at sea and the Greek artillery on land. Twice Reshid brought a force from Athens to dislodge Gordon’s troops, and though he failed to drive them into the sea he effectively deterred them from advancing on Athens. This stalemate still persisted, and the monastery of Áyios Spirídhon was still holding out, when at the end of April 1827 Cochrane and Church arrived on the scene.
By then the Greek army for the attack on Athens had been considerably strengthened. Karaïskákis, fresh from a victory over the Turks in the winter snows of Aráchova near Delphi, had joined it with some 3,000 men. Others had come in from the Peloponnese and Hydra, and the Greek soldiers now numbered about 10,000. But with the arrival of Cochrane and Church counsels became even more divided. Cochrane was for marching straight to the Akropolis, accused the Greeks of cowardice for not doing so, and threatened to leave unless his wishes were met. Karaïskákis, stung by the accusation of cowardice, refused to move while the Turks still held Áyios Spirídhon. Cochrane was for storming this monastery, but Karaïskákis and Church argued successfully for a negotiated capitulation. Under its terms the garrison with its arms was to be conducted by Greek troops to Reshid’s camp at Athens, but hardly had the procession left Piraeus on 28 April when a trivial dispute broke out between garrison and escort, a shot went off, firing became general, and before long 200 of the garrison lay dead, only seventy escaping. Gordon resigned his command in horror, as he had done after the bloody fall of Tripolis six years earlier. Church too threatened to resign, but was persuaded to stay, though he was blamed by Gordon for retiring to a schooner in the bay instead of being present at the evacuation. Karaïskákis, with other Greek captains, had marched in the middle of the Turkish and Albanian column as security for its safety, and only he came out of the affair with credit. According to Gordon ‘Karaiskaki strove at the hazard of his own life to stop the slaughter, and when he perceived it was to no purpose, cried to the Moslems, “Forgive me, as I forgive you; I can do nothing more for you.”’8
With the obstacle of Áyios Spirídhon removed, Cochrane resumed his pressure for a march on Athens. It is difficult now to visualise the terrain he was looking at. Today the concrete sprawl of the conurbation of Athens and Piraeus covers the whole area; then one could look straight across from the high ground above Piraeus to the Akropolis about four miles away. To the left were olive groves stretching towards Athens, and to the right an open plain. The coast to the right was the empty shoreline of the Bay of Pháliron. Karaïskákis was still opposed to a march on Athens, especially across the open plain where the Greeks would be at the mercy of the Turkish cavalry, but Cochrane insisted. ‘Where I command,’ he is reported as saying, ‘all other authority ceases.’9 It was eventually agreed that 2,500 men – regulars, philhellenes and some of the Greek irregulars – would be shipped across to the other side of the Bay of Pháliron and from there march on Athens, while 7,000 Greek irregulars remained at Piraeus and points west to give support to the advancing column.
The last opposition to Cochrane’s plan vanished when, in a skirmish two days before the proposed venture, a Turkish horseman shot Karaïskákis in the stomach. He died next day on Church’s schooner, remembered variously as the turncoat convicted of treason in 1824, or as the uncertain ally who had failed to support the exodus from Mesolongi, or as the principled and heroic casualty of the battle of Athens. His death removed the only Greek captain with the standing to halt or even to modify Cochrane’s risky scheme.
On the evening of 5 May 1827 the attacking force of 2,500 men was shipped east from Piraeus across the Bay of Pháliron, and disembarked at midnight. ‘Tomorrow,’ claimed Cochrane, ‘we will dine in the Akropolis.’10 But from then on everything went wrong. ‘If the plan deserves the severest censure,’ wrote Gordon,
what shall we say to the pitiful method in which it was executed? As the Admiral [Cochrane] had nothing to do with the motions of the troops when once ashore, and the General [Church], satisfied with having sketched a disposition, staid in his vessel till daylight, the captains, all on a footing of equality, acted independently, halting where they chose; so that the column was scattered over a space of four miles, the front within cannon-shot of Athens, the rear close to the sea, and the soldiers, unprovided with spades and pickaxes, dug the earth with their daggers, in order to cover themselves from the charge of horse.11
When daylight revealed the scattered Greek forces Reshid attacked. The leading contingent stood firm, but those behind fell back towards the sea and soon the rout became general. The reserve force of 7,000 Greek irregulars did nothing to help and withdrew to the west. When Cochrane and Church finally landed from their ships in the bay they were caught up in the fleeing mêlée and only just escaped to the small boats offshore. The Greek losses were the worst of any single day in the whole war: 1,500 were killed, including 240 prisoners who were beheaded. Of the twenty-six philhellenes in the action only four escaped. Another philhellene, an English surgeon on Cochrane’s ship, gave the day a concise label in his poem The Athenaid, simply calling it ‘The sixth of May, the awful sixth of May’.12
Despite this disastrous defeat the expedition’s base at Pháliron had been held by a determined last-minute resistance, and Church hung on there with a reduced force for three more weeks. Heat and thirst eventually got the better of them, and on 27 May they left. Church had already recommended capitulation to Fabvier and the others besieged in the Akropolis, which they at first refused, but with Church’s departure they accepted defeat. Within a week surrender terms were agreed through the mediation of the French admiral de Rigny. On 5 June the Akropolis garrison of some 2,000 marched out, escorted by Reshid himself and a body of cavalry to ensure that there was no retaliation for the massacre of surrendered Turks at Áyios Spirídhon. This final act of the battle for Athens provoked yet more recriminations. Contemporaries, while accepting that conditions in the Akropolis were harsh, claimed that its wells provided enough water, even if only just enough, and that there was six months’ supply of food. The capitulators of the Akropolis were compared unfavourably with the heroes of Mesolongi, and Church was blamed for suggesting surrender, de Rigny for negotiating it and Fabvier for accepting it. But on any rational view the defenders of the Akropolis were right to make terms. After a relieving force of 10,000, under the command of two distinguished foreigners, had tried to save them, failed disastrously and gone away, what was the point in them holding out any longer?
Dissension on the Greek side had marked every phase of the year-long battle for Athens. There was a basic disagreement over whether to starve Reshid into retreat by attacking his supply lines or to make a direct assault on his army at Athens. Cochrane was the most determined advocate of direct attack, but was criticised for arrogant overconfidence and for contemptuously dismissing more realistic Greek proposals. Church was blamed for being too weak to impose his authority, and both Cochrane and Church for staying too remote from the action. As Makriyánnis caustically put it, ‘These Europeans, whom we had made our leaders, were for ever carrying out their business from ships: it was from the deck that they did battle with the enemy on land and slaughtered them with speeches and schemes.’13 The captains of the Greek irregulars tended either to act independently of their nominal European commanders or not to act at all. Both things happened on the awful sixth of May, with catastrophic results.
Was direct assault on Reshid the right strategy? Gordon argued consistently, at the time and in his history, for the alternative of cutting off Reshid’s supplies. Gordon had long experience of the war in Greece, but in this case he was probably wrong. Reshid had many potential lines of supply by land and by sea, and attempts to cut them all would have amounted to no more than pinprick attacks. Direct assault was the only way to dislodge Reshid from Athens, and Cochrane, hot-headed and opinionated as he was, was right to back it enthusiastically. But direct assault needed co-ordination, and this was what the forces at Athens disastrously lacked. Cochrane and Church had been appointed in order to unify the Greek war effort on land and sea. When the new commanders were put to the test, the result was even deeper and more acrimonious division.