2
A Seed is Sown
1797–1821
On 28 June 1797 a squadron of French naval ships and troop transports arrived off the fortified port of Corfu, the administrative capital of the Ionian islands. For six hundred years the islands had been overseas possessions of the Most Serene Republic of Venice. The arrival of the French that June day was the first news anyone in the islands had that the Serenissima was no more. The tone of the general’s first message sent ashore was friendly. The last Venetian governor, whose predecessors for centuries had been honoured by the title Provveditore Generale, found himself addressed by the French commanding officer as ‘Citizen’, and was ordered to provide quarters for the newly arrived troops. The Venetian Senate had capitulated to the superior firepower of Napoleon Bonaparte, he explained, so the French were now the legitimate rulers of the islands. The letter was dated according to the French Revolutionary calendar: 6 Messidor, Year V. Once the troops had gone ashore, billboards appeared all over Corfu town, promising in French, Italian and Greek to bring ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ to ‘long-enslaved Greece’. The revolution that since 1789 had thrown the whole of western Europe into turmoil had arrived in the east.
A ‘Tree of Liberty’ was planted in one of the main squares two days later. Aristocratic symbols were publicly burned amid a ritual thanksgiving to the ‘Supreme Being’ (place-server for the Christian deity in the French Revolutionary pantheon). Not everyone was equally pleased. A French naval officer, who joined the squadron shortly afterwards, reported general satisfaction at the arrival of his compatriots, but felt obliged to add the rider: ‘with the exception of the nobles, those employed by the former government, and priests’.1 The traditional hierarchy of the islands had been suddenly turned on its head. By autumn 1797 the French were fully established throughout the seven islands. All the indications were that they meant to stay. They even created a new administration based on three new départements that were added to France.
Some months later, on 20 December 1797, came a shock of a different sort. From Trieste, the Austrian port city on the Adriatic, the local governor, Baron Brigido, wrote to his superior, Count von Pergen in Vienna, to report the uncovering of a conspiracy. A tip-off from a Greek merchant in the city had led to a number of arrests. Incriminating proof had been found. The arrested men had been plotting a French-style revolution in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire. The ringleader was not himself a merchant, but belonged to the educated Greek-speaking elite of Bucharest, the capital of Wallachia. It turned out under interrogation that the conspirators had spent the past year in Vienna, printing the revolutionary tracts that had just been found in their possession. The ringleader’s name was given as Rigas Velestinlis.
The documents found in Rigas’s possession during the night of 19–20 December 1797 were a set of blueprints for turning the Ottoman Empire into a democratic republic on the French model. There was even a rousing ‘Battle Hymn’ or ‘War Song’, in verse, including an oath of allegiance to the newly imagined republic.
The Austrian authorities had good reason to fear anything that smacked of Revolutionary France. As recently as October, the Treaty of Campo Formio had divided the spoils of the defeated Republic of Venice between Napoleon and the Austrians, forcing the latter to give up territory to the French in northern Europe and accept Napoleon’s conquests in Italy. Until then it had been thought likely that the next target for French expansion would be Vienna itself. By the end of the year, diplomatic relations had only just been restored, and remained fragile. The prospect of revolutionary activity on Austrian soil, even if aimed primarily at a different power, was bound to horrify the authorities. Their response was swift and deadly. The discovery of Rigas’s conspiracy was hushed up. The accused were brought secretly to Vienna. There, they underwent a series of interrogations, but nothing so public as a trial, during the first months of 1798. Finally, eight of the accused, including Rigas, all of them Ottoman subjects, were transported down the Danube and passed in chains from Austrian into Ottoman custody. On or about the night of 24 June they were executed in prison in Belgrade and their bodies thrown into the Danube.
One of the ironies of this story is how little impact it can have made on public consciousness at the time. The interrogations of Rigas and his associates, first in Trieste and then in Vienna, were conducted in secret. The transcripts did not come to light until almost a century later. Nothing of what was happening was reported in the press. Only the last journey of the extradited men down the Danube was covered in a few Austrian and German reports. Indeed, so successful were the Austrian authorities in suppressing all trace of the conspiracy that not a single one of the three thousand copies of his revolutionary proclamation that Rigas had had printed in Vienna survives today. Only the ‘Battle Hymn’ would reach the public domain any time soon – naturally enough in French-controlled Corfu, within a few months of its author’s death.
In another respect the Austrian interrogators were less successful. The documents in their possession were proof enough of revolutionary intentions. But we do not to this day know how Rigas planned to implement them, or indeed whether at the time when he arrived at Trieste, to find that he and his comrades had been betrayed, he had any firm plan at all. According to one account, his next port of call was to have been Venice, and a summit meeting with Napoleon himself. Another has Rigas and his associates heading for the southern tip of the Peloponnese, there to raise rebellion among the fierce and semi-independent warlords of Mani, whose fortified towers still form part of a wild, mountainous landscape. A third account gives their intended destination as the town of Preveza on the west coast of the Greek mainland, a dependency of the Ionian islands and therefore under French control. The first plan would have been a waste of time, since Napoleon had already left Italy, as Rigas may or may not have known. Most probable is the third scheme, and this was what the Austrians believed. It is hard to see how else a handful of political idealists could have challenged the might of the Ottoman Empire, unless with military backing from France. Preveza was one of only a handful of toeholds on the mainland that the French had acquired with mastery of the islands. This idea would have made sense. But perhaps there was no firm plan at all. On the available evidence, Rigas was not the most practical of would-be revolutionaries.
The great majority of Greek speakers, elite or not, could have had little awareness of these events at the time when they happened. But within a few years the ripples sent out by Napoleon’s campaigns in Europe had spread throughout the East. And the name of Rigas would be on the lips of every Greek as the ‘protomartyr’ of a movement that had not yet been born, but would soon crystallize into something that would have astonished Rigas himself: a movement for a new kind of self-determination that was fast becoming known as ‘national’.
A WORLD IN TURMOIL
During the first months of 1798 nobody in Europe could tell which way Napoleon would turn next. Austria was temporarily off the hook – its turn would come in 1805. An invasion of Great Britain was on the cards. Rigas and his friends were not alone in hoping for liberation at the hands of French Revolutionary troops. It would have been only a logical extension of what had just happened in the Ionian islands. There is some evidence that Napoleon himself toyed with the idea, while he was in Italy in 1797. In the event, the forces of the French Revolution did turn eastwards towards the Ottoman Empire – but not its European provinces. On 1 July 1798 a French expeditionary force landed at Alexandria. Napoleon’s three-year occupation of Egypt had begun.
For centuries Egypt had been an Ottoman possession. At this time its Mameluke rulers were all but independent of Constantinople. But the shock of an invasion from Europe went all the way to the heart of the empire. In August, while the British Royal Navy under Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet in Aboukir Bay (the battle of the Nile) and cut off the supply lines to Napoleon’s occupation, diplomacy in the Ottoman capital brought together the unlikeliest of allies. A century of enmity between Turkey and Russia was set aside. Both empires now joined an alliance with Great Britain.
The upheavals of the next fifteen years affected every corner of the European landmass and the entire Mediterranean. Consider the fortunes of the Ionian islands. After little more than a year of incorporation into the French Republic, the seven islands were taken over by a combined Russian and Ottoman naval force during the closing months of 1798. Then in 1800 the new rulers, unable to agree on anything else to do with them, set up a ‘Septinsular Republic’ under the nominal protection of Russia. This was an extraordinary step. At a stroke, for the first time in modern history, it gave a Greek-speaking population control of its own administration, and that under the provocative title of ‘republic’. The experiment was not a great success. While the republic lasted, British troops were briefly landed to maintain order in Corfu in 1801. Then from 1802 the Russians moved back to take effective control – though it is significant that they did so through a plenipotentiary who was himself a member of the Ionian aristocracy and therefore belonged to the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ that now extended far into the Russian establishment. When in 1807 Tsar Alexander made peace with Napoleon, as a gesture of goodwill he handed the Ionian islands back to France, although strictly speaking they were not quite his to give. For the next two years the islands were absorbed into what had in the meantime become the French Empire. But then in the autumn of 1809 all except Corfu were seized by the British Royal Navy. Finally, Corfu too capitulated after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1814. For fifty years after that, the Ionian islands would be ruled by Great Britain as a ‘protectorate’.
Confused? Imagine what it must have been like for Greek speakers at the time. There were no newspapers in the islands or in the Ottoman Empire. News travelled slowly, and was often unreliable. None of these shifts was decisive; each was rapidly overtaken by the next. Most of the Great Power players in the game changed sides at least once. Whether you lived on one of the Ionian islands and experienced these upheavals directly, or heard about them long afterwards, it was bound to seem as though all political certainties had been thrown up in the air.
In the Ottoman principalities that lay to the north of the Danube, another of those borderlands in which Greek elites had come to predominate during the previous century, the situation was even worse. A sideshow to the continent-wide story of the Napoleonic Wars, and barely noticed by historians of that conflict, yet another Russo-Turkish war raged from 1806 until 1812. This war was fought mainly in and over the principalities, and involved horrific sieges and sackings of fortified towns. For six years Wallachia and Moldavia were annexed by Russia; the traditional office of prince was abolished. Even so, most of the actual administration of the principalities continued in the hands of the same Greek Orthodox elite as previously. It was only the worsening relations between Tsar Alexander and Napoleon, in 1812, that brought this vicious and finally inconclusive war to an end. With Napoleon’s fateful invasion of Russia imminent, peace was established between the Russian and Ottoman empires by the Treaty of Bucharest on 28 May 1812. Russia permanently annexed part of Moldavia. Apart from that, the status quo that had worked so well throughout the eighteenth century was restored. The Greek princes returned to the devastated principalities, under the same arrangements with the Sultan as before.
Napoleon’s campaign against Russia in 1812 marked the beginning of the end for the French Empire, that vast projection of military power and certain sorts of idealism that had been born out of the Revolution of 1789. By the summer of 1814 it was all over – bar Napoleon’s dramatic escape from imprisonment on the island of Elba and his ‘hundred days’ that ended with the battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. The representatives of the victorious powers that had gathered at Vienna the previous year would soon finish their work of re-establishing a deeply conservative set of regimes across Europe. After the Congress of Vienna, all traces of revolutionary rhetoric and reform were removed throughout the continent. The ‘Concert of Europe’, which had emerged victorious from the Napoleonic Wars, established a new watchword instead: restoration. But the spirit that had animated the revolution in France in 1789, and nostalgia for the all-conquering brilliance of Napoleon Bonaparte, lived on in many quarters in Europe. The years of ‘restoration’ after 1815 were also years of conspiracies and secret societies, of plots and abortive revolutions. This was the climate in which the seed that would grow into the Greek Revolution of 1821 would be nurtured.
The changes and the instability that came to the Greek-speaking populations of the borderlands and the Ottoman Empire from outside, thanks to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, are only one part of the story. During those years the empire was also subject to internal challenges in which the Christian Orthodox inhabitants of several different regions found themselves caught up.
It used to be a truism in Western historical accounts that from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards the Ottoman Empire was in a state of terminal decline, fatally weakened by a series of wars against the rising power of Russia. Internally, the centralized authority of the sultans was being eroded by the rise of regional and local players at every level. It was a sure recipe for imminent collapse. So the standard story goes. Certainly there were many European observers around the turn of the nineteenth century who believed this to be true – including Napoleon, who might not otherwise have invaded Egypt. In this way was born the ‘Eastern Question’ that would come to dominate diplomatic and strategic attitudes to Europe’s southeastern border throughout the nineteenth century. The existence of this perception is part of the background to the Greek Revolution of the 1820s. But was it any more than a perception?
Reports of the imminent demise of the Ottoman Empire would prove premature by more than a century. Napoleon failed in Egypt, after all. It would take the Great War of 1914–18 and the rise of a secular nationalist movement among the Turks of Anatolia finally to kill off the empire – and not until 1923. The Ottoman Empire, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, had been undergoing complex internal changes. But the picture as it emerges today is not one of irreversible decline. During the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first two of the nineteenth, the empire did indeed face very serious internal threats. But by the early 1830s, with the single exception of Greek independence, it had successfully seen them off. Viewed in that context, the Greek achievement is all the more remarkable.
These threats took a variety of different forms. At the most local level, in many regions, increasing numbers of armed brigands ‘took to the mountains’, as the traditional Greek phrase has it. Rising up the social scale, but still at a fairly local level, power was becoming concentrated in the hands of a landowning and relatively wealthy class – and this despite a legal framework in which officially all property belonged to the Sultan alone. During the eighteenth century the practice of ‘tax farming’ had become general in the provinces. Officials would subcontract the obligation to collect and deliver taxes to local notables, traditionally known in English as ‘primates’. These primates, in turn, had every incentive to collect more than they were obliged to deliver, and to live handsomely on the difference.
In some areas, such as the Peloponnese, where the Muslim population was sparse, it became possible for Orthodox Christians to claim most of the prerogatives of this class. In the absence of any centralized authority, such as a police force, to maintain order in their localities, Christian primates would rely on locally recruited manpower, just as their Muslim counterparts did. In the Peloponnese, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, brigandage had become such a scourge that the landowners, Muslim and Christian, made common cause in 1806 to root it out. This policy was remarkably successful. Many brigands were killed. Others took refuge in the Ionian islands. Brigands and brigandage would not return to the Peloponnese until the outbreak of the Greek Revolution, all the more effective for the military training that had come with service in any or all of the foreign armies that had occupied the islands during the Napoleonic Wars.
Local landowners and tax farmers were in a position to make the most of the weakness of the central authority at the time, and in turn profited from it. But they were still nothing like a threat. That began to change when individual primates began to increase their power and wealth at the expense of their neighbours. This was notoriously the case with Ali Pasha, also called Ali Tepedelenli (from his birthplace now known as Tepelenë in Albania) and nicknamed the ‘Lion of Ioannina’. Born into an Albanian-speaking family that had recently converted from Orthodox Christianity to Islam, Ali during a long life combined devious diplomacy with ruthless cruelty to make himself the effective ruler, by the 1790s, of a swathe of territory that today makes up the southern half of Albania and much of northern Greece. He held this enormous power nominally from the Sultan. But the title ‘Pasha of Yanya [Ioannina]’, like others that he had enjoyed before it, had been granted retrospectively. Everybody knew that it had been a land grab, and the Sultan had grudgingly had to acquiesce in it.
Ali Pasha, by the turn of the nineteenth century, had become powerful enough to hold his own court, wage wars and even engage in diplomacy with foreign powers on his own account, without much reference to the Sultan. He was not the only one. Further east, from his base at Vidin on the south side of the Danube, Osman Pasvanoğlu became the first of these warlords to defy the authority of the Sultan openly. His revolt, beginning in 1795, would take three years and an army estimated by one source at 200,000 men to suppress – inconclusively, as Pasvanoğlu would then be pardoned by the Sultan, to die in his bed in 1807.2 Two decades after the revolt of Pasvanoğlu, Ali Pasha, now in his seventies, would make his own bid for full independence. The result this time was different. In 1822 Ali’s severed head with its famously long white beard would be displayed outside the Topkapı palace in Istanbul. In this case, so soon after the outbreak of the Greek Revolution the year before, Ottoman central authority had successfully reasserted itself.
The internal threats posed by warlords such as Osman Pasvanoğlu and Ali Tepedelenli had nothing to do with either religious or what today we would call ethnic allegiances. Both men were Muslims. Both made war on neighbouring Christians, but they also harboured and encouraged members of the Orthodox elites at their own courts. There is a story that Pasvanoğlu once owed his life to Rigas and tried to repay the debt by marching on Belgrade to spring him from jail on the eve of his execution. The story is probably not true. But it is a fact that Rigas’s ‘Battle Hymn’ singles out Pasvanoğlu as an example of a heroic freedom fighter to be emulated by the Greeks.
In Ioannina, Ali Pasha revelled in creating the court of an ‘enlightened despot’, attracting men of letters and the arts from all over the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. The teacher and educationalist Athanasios Psalidas and the poet and translator Ioannis Vilaras found employment there. The personal physician entrusted with the welfare of one of Ali’s sons was the young Ioannis Kolettis, who would later emerge as one of the most effective of the political leaders during the first two decades of independent Greece. All the official correspondence of Ali’s court was written in Greek. But when it came down to it, Ali was far more despot than enlightened. Like all the primates-turned-warlords, great and small, Ali Pasha was motivated by nothing other than self-aggrandizement. When he finally came to risk everything in a desperate act of defiance against his master the Sultan, Ali, like Pasvanoğlu before him, represented nothing but his own personal ambition. And this must be at least part of the reason why both men failed.
A different kind of threat to the authority of the Sultan came from within the imperial military establishment. For centuries the janissaries had been an elite corps of shock troops, charged with guarding the Sultan’s person and always in the vanguard during the Ottoman wars of expansion. In those days they had been recruited from the Christian population. Young boys had been forcibly removed from their families, converted to Islam and brought up to an austere life in barracks. Janissaries had been forbidden to marry, so that they would know no other loyalty than to their sovereign. But no longer. By the late eighteenth century the janissaries had become a self-serving anachronism, a privileged caste that now enjoyed and exploited the right to recruit its own members without limit. The costs of maintaining this corps were rising in proportion to the decline in its military efficiency. For some years, Sultan Selim III had been trying to reform them. But with a near-monopoly on the use of force within the empire, the janissaries were in a strong position to resist. Indeed so powerful had they become that they were the driving force behind a rebellion in the capital that led to the murders of two reigning sultans, the would-be reformer Selim III and his successor Mustafa IV, within the space of a few months in 1808. It was out of this debacle that Sultan Mahmud II would come to power – and decisively reverse the fortunes of his office.
During the reign of Selim, the janissaries had thought nothing of taking the law into their own hands. In one distant corner of the empire their excesses sparked a local conflict that would turn out to be prophetic of things to come. The revolt of the Serbian knezes, or peasant leaders, in 1804, has often been seen as the first of the ‘national’ revolts that would lead to the creation of the modern Balkans. But that is the interpretation of hindsight. A typically vicious set of tit-for-tat killings in Belgrade province had been sparked by the janissaries asserting their own authority over that of the Sultan’s representatives. In the conflict that followed, the Orthodox Christian population found itself fighting for the Ottoman Sultan against his internal enemies. The revolt of 1804 was eventually crushed, though it took nine years and in the meantime the situation had become further complicated by Russian involvement.
A second Serbian revolt, in 1815, succeeding in establishing, for the first time, an Orthodox Christian warlord, Miloš Obrenović, in charge of an Ottoman province. Sultan Mahmud, preoccupied with larger threats to his authority, was content to accept this state of affairs in return for the new warlord’s loyalty. Compared to the Muslim Ali Pasha further south, this was no threat at all. Still, a precedent had been set. And the prolonged struggles of the Orthodox Serbs had nourished the first stirrings of what in time would grow into a strong popular movement for national self-determination. In this way a reactionary, decentralizing force (the janissaries) had set in train a series of events that would long outlast that force itself. Sultan Mahmud’s annihilation of the janissaries in 1826, while the Greek Revolution was at its height, would prove to be one of the most spectacular achievements of a ruthless reign.
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century – and despite the sometimes lurid prognostications that circulated in Europe – the empire was undergoing a slow process of internal upheaval and reform. Where this might lead, nobody could tell. At all levels of society, but particularly among the elites, Muslims and Christians were capable of making common cause against perceived threats to all their livelihoods. Allegiances were unstable, shifting in response to unpredictable transfers of power from one centre or institution to another. It was, in a way, only a mirror of what was going on throughout the rest of Europe between 1789 and 1815.
In the midst of all this turmoil, ideas of national self-determination, of the rights of citizens, of liberté, égalité, fraternité, were beginning to circulate, and nowhere more so than in the borderlands where Greek-educated Orthodox Christians made up the elite. For the time being, though, these ideas were for the few.
REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS
First into print was Rigas Velestinlis, the doomed conspirator arrested in 1797. Of Rigas himself we know rather little. He was born in either 1757 or 1758, into a well-to-do family in the village of Velestino in Thessaly, not far from today’s city of Volos. His parents could afford to give him an education, and this became his passport into the Greek-educated elite of the Ottoman Empire. Baptized as Antonios the son of Kyritsis, in adult life he chose to adopt the name ‘Rigas’. This is not normally a name in Greek, but is a homely word meaning ‘king’ (mostly in fairy tales and card games – it is never used of real royals). In the social class that Rigas came from, no one had a surname. So, like many others before and after him, he invented one from his birthplace. Confusingly, Rigas has two such names: Velestinlis, which means ‘of Velestino’, and ‘Pheraios’, from Pherai, an ancient place name associated with the locality. Portraits show Rigas to have been bull-necked, with twirled moustaches and black curly hair, florid-faced with a paunch, and a slightly mournful expression in his jet-black eyes.
Rigas’s career, to the extent that we know about it, follows a path familiar enough in the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’: from a rural province to the capital and from there to the Greek-speaking court of Bucharest in the Danubian principalities. From there he would pay several visits to Vienna. In keeping with the spirit and the practice of the ‘Greek Enlightenment’, most of his work consisted of translations and adaptations of Western originals.
Nothing else that he did was so radical as Rigas’s final choice, to translate the French Revolutionary constitution of 1793. At the time, and for those contemporaries who were touched by Rigas’s work, what was shocking, new and (depending on your point of view) exhilarating was the fact of importing these ideas into the Greek language and the thought-world of the Ottoman Empire at all. On the other hand, for historians of ideas and political theorists of later times, what is remarkable about Rigas’s translation is not what he took from his original, but what he added to it.
The translator’s individual stamp appears already in the title. What is baldly presented in French by the one word Constitution becomes, in Greek, New Civil Government of the Inhabitants of European Turkey, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean Islands and Wallachia and Moldavia.3 Rigas’s blueprint is not for any narrowly defined homeland but for a ‘Hellenic Republic’ that is to encompass all the Ottoman provinces in Europe and the whole of Anatolia, including today’s Greece, Turkey and most of the Balkans. Rigas’s most startling achievement was drastically to adapt the prototype hammered out during the ‘Terror’ in Paris to the multi-cultural, multi-faith reality of the Ottoman Empire.
His vision is astonishingly inclusive, and not just in terms of territory. Article 7 of the section that lays down constitutional principles reads:
The sovereign people consists of all the inhabitants of this kingdom without exception for religion or language: Hellenes, Bulgarians, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Turks and every other kind of race.
Elsewhere the ‘sovereign people’ are named as ‘Hellenic’ and as ‘the descendants of the Hellenes’ (that is, of the ancient Greeks).4 Clearly this population will not be defined by any unified genetic inheritance, but rather by a shared culture and a shared geographical space, as well as the voluntary commitment, on the part of all these disparate language groups and different religious communities, to identify themselves with it.
Rigas’s ideas have often been termed utopian, and in some ways they are; but not necessarily in this respect. Rigas’s ‘Hellenic Republic’ was an attempt to capitalize on something that did actually exist, in the form of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. The prestige of Greek as the common language of education had been thoroughly established by this time throughout the empire’s European provinces and large parts of Anatolia. And although Rigas’s ideas were entirely secular (he removed from the French original even the reference to the ‘Supreme Being’),5 it is the existing role and reach of the Orthodox hierarchy and Greek-educated Phanariot networks that tacitly underpin the whole enterprise.
Article 4 is more inclusive still. Almost anyone can become Hellenic, in Rigas’s understanding of the term, if his (or seemingly even her) services can be useful to the state. It is in this sense, for the first time in Greek, that Rigas uses the word ethnos. Residence, religion or language will count too: ‘Someone who speaks either modern or ancient Greek, and aids Greece, even if he lives in the Antipodes (because the Hellenic yeast has spread into both hemispheres), is a Hellene and a citizen.’ Religious tolerance is fundamental. So is equality, which Rigas takes further than in the French original to extend to women as well as men. Women are even expected to serve in the army, ‘carrying spears, in case they cannot handle a musket’.6
There is a certain magnificence about all this. In some ways Rigas is far ahead of his time (it was not until 2016 that full combat roles were opened to women in the UK or the US military). The multiculturalism that since the late twentieth century has often been nostalgically attributed to the Ottoman Empire, in the pages of Rigas’s New Civil Government becomes harnessed to a modernizing programme that might have turned the cities of the eastern Mediterranean into pluralist, democratic, law-governed communities long before London, Paris or New York. Rigas’s ‘Hellenic Republic’ is ‘Greek’ in the way that the English poet Shelley would soon declare that the whole of Europe was: as the cultural inheritor of the ancient legacy. At a time when American and French republicans were fashioning their own identities and institutions after the models of classical Athens and Rome, and when disparate groups of European immigrants on the other side of the Atlantic were finding a common identity as US citizens, it was not necessarily unrealistic to imagine something similar happening in the Balkans and Anatolia. Or was it?
The French constitution of 1793 was the product of very particular conditions that followed the Revolution. Within two years it had been replaced by another, less radical. Even in France the provisions that Rigas was attempting to transplant into the very different conditions of the Ottoman Empire had been found to be unworkable. We know that Rigas knew this, because he drew on some of the later provisions in his own version. What chance did such wholly foreign ideas have in what was essentially a feudal, theocratic society? How was the new system to be brought into existence?
This is where there really is something utopian about Rigas’s blueprint. There is scarcely a hint of a practical programme anywhere in his document, such as might lead to the new state of affairs it sets out. Where there is, it seems either pettifogging or overblown. An added paragraph about the military organization of an insurgency tells us only that in charge of every ten men there should be a decurion, of every hundred a centurion, and so on. Soldiers are to sport the black, white and red colours of the Republic, respectively in their underwear, their tunics and their boots. Red boots – really? It was hardly Rigas’s fault that his choice of colours, which were also to feature on the Republic’s tricolour flag, would later be adopted by Hitler’s Nazis for their own emblem, the swastika. Every soldier, writes Rigas, is to wear a helmet and every citizen a cap, on which will be emblazoned the symbol of the Republic: the club of Hercules with three small crosses planted on the upper side of its bulbous tip.7
Much else that Rigas added to his French original was clearly designed to persuade – something that was unnecessary in Paris in 1793, where the revolution had already happened and enforcement took the form of the guillotine. A floridly written preface elaborates on the evils of tyranny experienced in the Ottoman Empire. Still more emotive and still more aspirational is the entirely original ‘Battle Hymn’ or ‘War Song’ with which the New Civil Government ends – a rousing call to revolution of a sort that the French legal text had no need for.8 Also entirely original to Rigas’s project was the accompanying map of southeast Europe and western Anatolia, printed on twelve separate large sheets, in which ancient place names and images of historical events were superimposed on the contemporary geography of those regions. Here Rigas was attempting to mobilize the new historical geography that had been gathering momentum in Greek throughout the preceding century, to underpin a political project that was vastly more ambitious. These visual accompaniments, no less than the stirring ‘Hymn’, have a clearly persuasive function, and may have been aimed at a wider public than could easily have read and understood the main text.
Rigas’s constitution for an imagined ‘Hellenic Republic’ would remain a dead letter, his revolution a paper exercise, a stillbirth. But the idea of Greek emancipation along the lines of Revolutionary France did not go away. Beginning at the very time of Rigas’s execution in the summer of 1798, this idea would be taken up again, and elaborated in a quite different direction.
In 1798, Adamantios Korais was already fifty years old, and living in Paris. His career as a public intellectual had not yet begun. Korais knew of the arrest and extradition of Rigas and his companions, though not yet their ultimate fate. He cannot have known much of what was in Rigas’s ill-fated New Civil Government. But what he knew was enough to make him salute ‘those brave martyrs for liberty’.9 On his desk before him, Korais had a pamphlet in Greek, issued by the newly established printing press of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, the highest authority in the Orthodox Church. The pamphlet reminded the faithful that it was God himself who had ‘raised up out of nothing the mighty empire of the Ottomans’ to rule over them, for the ultimate good of the Orthodox faith and to guarantee the ‘salvation of the chosen peoples’. Nothing remarkable about that: it had been the official position of the Church since the fifteenth century. What was new was what followed: the faithful were warned of the latest ruse thought up by the Devil to damn them in this world and the next. This was none other than ‘the much-vaunted political programme of liberty’.10 The Paternal Instruction, as this pamphlet was titled, was not the first, but it was the strongest reaction by the Orthodox hierarchy to the dangerous new secular ideas spreading from France. Its timing may well have been a response to news of Rigas’s thwarted conspiracy.
Adamantios Korais – former merchant in silks, trained doctor of medicine, self-educated classical scholar, and close observer of every phase of the French Revolution in his adopted city – took up his pen to strike back. He chose to do so anonymously. Parodying the title of his target, he called his rebuttal Fraternal Instruction. The third component of the French Revolutionary trinity, Fraternité, had arrived in Greek. On Korais’s side he had a devout and erudite knowledge of the Scriptures. But he also mobilized principles he had learnt from Dutch Protestant masters, first in his native Smyrna and then in Amsterdam. Obedience to God, Korais thundered:
means nothing other than that we must obey the laws because the laws are nothing other than the unanimous and common opinion of a people, and the voice of a people is the voice of God.
Therefore, he concluded, far from owing obedience to the Ottomans, ‘Those ruled by tyrants have the inalienable right to seek every sort of means in order to throw off the yoke of tyranny and to enjoy once more the precious gift of self-government.’11
So began the thirty-five-year career of the foremost intellectual architect of Greek independence, often hailed subsequently as the ‘father of the Greek nation’.
In this way, Korais seems to slot naturally into the story as Rigas’s intellectual heir, continuing the work that Rigas had begun. But it was not really like that. Korais, born in 1748, was older by ten years. The two men were as different in intellectual outlook as they were in background, appearance and temperament. Korais had started out as a city boy, brought up in cosmopolitan Smyrna, one of the great cities of the Ottoman Empire, while Rigas’s background was provincial. Rigas had acquired his learning within the empire, Korais in Europe. Rigas in his portraits looks as though he must have enjoyed the good things of life. Korais, dressed in the Western manner, is austerely portrayed in high collars. He appears hollow-chested with thin, tapering shoulders (he may have suffered from tuberculosis in his youth). He is clean-shaven with a severe expression that seems to owe something to classical Roman portraiture. Rigas may have dreamed of putting his ideas into practice in person, placing himself at the head of a band of revolutionaries. Korais’s entire life was dedicated to books – to reading and writing. The few other things that he ever did, such as running his father’s business in Amsterdam or qualifying as a medical doctor in Montpellier, according to his own testimony he did only in order to assuage his ‘thirst for learning’.12 There was never any question, for Korais, of taking an active part in political affairs. Having settled in Paris a year before the French Revolution, he never again travelled far from the city. Indeed, so far as is known, Korais never at any time set foot in any part of today’s Greece. His was a life of the mind.
Where Rigas had leapt ahead to legislate for an imagined republic, Korais never made concrete proposals for how an independent Greece ought to be run – until much later, when the Revolution of 1821 forced his hand. To begin with, while the French Army of the Orient remained in Egypt, and for a little while after, Korais was one of those who saw French arms as the way to the liberation of Greece. In that case, he would have been content to see the government of the French Republic extended to his fellow citizens, as had briefly happened in the Ionian islands in 1797 and 1798. There would be no need to legislate further. But even during this earliest phase of Korais’s political thinking, certain new features stand out. These mark a decisive shift away from the approach of Rigas.
Where Rigas’s constitution translates the French word nation in contexts where it means primarily the state, Korais uses the same Greek word, ethnos, to translate the then-emerging, more nebulous concept of what today we would call an ‘ethnic group’.13 Where Rigas had allowed for all the religious and linguistic identities of the Balkans to buy into a new ‘Hellenic’ identity, the logic of Korais’s position obliged him to exclude all those who were not Greek from his understanding of the ‘nation’.
Korais followed Edward Gibbon and other Western historians of the ancient world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in placing the demise of the ancient Greek world very early. The Greeks had already become a subject people under the Roman Empire, he insisted. They had continued in subjection throughout the millennium when Greek-speaking emperors ruled from Constantinople. In another polemical tract, written in 1801, also published under a pseudonym, Korais deplored the legacy of Byzantium to the Greeks of his own day:
many times the [Byzantine] army would raise up to the imperial throne not genuine Romans, but Thracians, Bulgars, Illyrians, Triballi, Armenians, and other such thrice-barbarous despots, whose yoke became the heavier, as one by one the lights of [ancient] Greece went out …14
Liberty now became attached to the bloodline of the nation. Rigas’s political vision had been founded upon what today we would call civic, or voluntarist, nationalism: individuals and groups choose to give up some element of their sovereignty for the good of all. This was what Rousseau had proposed in The Social Contract four decades before. For Korais, instead, the nation is defined by its inheritance – which incidentally explains why so much of his intellectual energy was directed towards what he called ‘one of the most inalienable possessions of the nation’, namely the Greek language.15 Already, in Korais’s writings from the very beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of the Greek nation is being defined in terms that today we would call ‘ethnic’.
Korais addressed his fullest early statement of these ideas not to his fellow Greeks, but to a learned society in Paris, the ‘Society of the Observers of Mankind’. These men were forerunners of modern anthropologists. All of them, except Korais himself, were French by birth. Their society had been formed during the Revolution. On 6 January 1803, Korais read to them a paper entitled ‘Dissertation on the present state of civilization in Greece’.16 Here, the extent of the shift from Rigas’s ideas becomes apparent. Rigas’s ‘Hellenic Republic’ was to have been something new. The ‘sovereign people’ might be the ‘descendants of the Hellenes’ of antiquity, but their political system was to be unlike any that had ever existed, unless perhaps the fledgling United States of America. By contrast, Korais seems to have been the first to envisage a future independent Greece in terms of a revival of the past. Writing in French, in the opening paragraph of this essay he introduced the terms that would define his later political trajectory: ‘nation’, ‘regeneration’, ‘civilization’. The last was a concept beloved of the Enlightenment. Although the ancient Greeks were generally credited with having invented it, there was no equivalent word in the Greek language. It was Korais himself who first coined one, and it remains standard today. The Greek ‘nation’, Korais conceded, echoing the terms of eighteenth-century French and British travellers, had ‘degenerated from the virtues of its ancestors’ and was at present ‘stagnating’ in a kind of ‘barbarism’.17 But this deplorable state had begun to change around the middle of the previous century.
The greater part of the essay is then devoted to the advances in education and commerce made in ‘Greece’ during the previous decades. Taken together, Korais declares, they amount to nothing less than a ‘revolution’ – but a ‘moral’ one.18 The process has lately been fuelled by the actual revolution in France. But the essay makes no mention of violent action. Instead, Korais describes the ‘awakening’ of the Greeks to the responsibility of trying to live up to the ancient ancestors whose name they bear. (This could more easily be said in French than in Greek, at a time when contemporary Greek speakers were still known as Romioi or, in Korais’s own preferred term, Graikoi, not by the ancient name of ‘Hellenes’.) The ‘regeneration’ of the ‘fatherland’ has begun. Finally, addressing the personification of that fatherland, Korais concludes that what gives purpose to his own life is ‘the hope of seeing you take up once again your proper rank among the nations’.19
For almost twenty years after that, Korais would devote his energies to promulgating this view among Greek speakers, particularly those in the Ottoman Empire. To this end he devised a series of editions of ancient texts, which he called the Hellenic Library. Produced to the highest standards of classical scholarship, these were prefaced by long essays in the modern language in which Korais elaborated his ideas for linguistic, educational and moral reform that would bring about the revival he so desired. Throughout these essays, Korais eschewed the language of violence and revolution that had characterized his early, unsigned polemics. Instead, he went to great lengths to flesh out the concept of ‘regeneration’ that he had first proposed in French. He did not expect to live to see the result. Indeed, near the end of his life he confessed that he had not expected the Greeks to be ready for their independence until 1851 – thirty years after the Revolution actually broke out.20
Not everyone who shared these ideas was prepared to be so patient. Hellenic Nomarchy, or Discourse on Liberty is an impassioned, at times an intemperate, work. Published anonymously in 1806, probably in the Italian port city of Livorno, it runs to just over 250 closely printed pages of modern Greek, without division into chapters or even paragraphs. Its author has never been convincingly identified.21
The book is dedicated to the memory of Rigas, whom it describes as a ‘great Hellene’, a ‘Hero’, ‘philhellene and patriot’ and the ‘liberator of Hellas’ – if only it hadn’t been for the ‘baseness and cowardice of his vile comrade, the most worthless traitor’ who had denounced Rigas to the Austrians. These phrases give something of the flavour of the work. But for all his admiration for Rigas, there is no sign that the anonymous author, any more than Korais before him, could have had access to the detail of Rigas’s political ideas. What the author of Hellenic Nomarchy knows and admires is the revolutionary ‘War Song’, which had been published in French-ruled Corfu shortly after its author’s death, and the story, which by this time had been well circulated, of Rigas’s betrayal and execution.22 The thrust of his argument, on the other hand, is far closer to that of Korais, whom he mentions with respect, than of Rigas, whom he venerates.
The essential premise of the work is that the only guarantor of human happiness and human advancement is the rule of law. The word nomarchy is the author’s own invention, a play on the word ‘monarchy’ that works the same in Greek as it does in English. By changing round two consonants, he neatly inverts the meaning: rule not of ‘one man’ (monos) but of ‘law’ (nomos). The whole book is a plea for liberation – for humankind in general, but more particularly for that population which the author has no hesitation in calling ‘Hellenes’. This was the term still usually reserved, in Greek, for the ancients. Even Korais, at this time, referred to his own contemporaries by the Latin-derived name Graikoi. But now, in Hellenic Nomarchy, the moderns were no longer simply the descendants of the Hellenes, as they had been for Korais and Rigas. They were not even the ‘new’ or ‘modern’ Hellenes that they had become in the 1791 Modern Geography of Philippidis and Konstantas. They were Hellenes. It can be hard for us, today, to appreciate what a radical step this was in 1806. In effect it translated into Greek a usage that had long been standard in the languages of the rest of Europe, in which the same words (‘Greece’ and ‘Greek’) did duty for a historic civilization, a geographical region and its present-day inhabitants.
Naturally, for the writer of Hellenic Nomarchy, these ‘Hellenes’ had to be attached to a homeland. On almost every page he writes of ‘Hellas’, in Greek, as Korais had written in French of la Grèce. Neither writer gives any precise sense of where the boundaries of this homeland might lie – and of course it existed on no political map at the time. By contrast, Rigas had been much more precise, in naming – and indeed mapping – the European and Anatolian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that were to comprise his ‘Hellenic Republic’. Rigas had been prepared to work from the political reality that existed in his day. Korais and the author of Hellenic Nomarchy, both of them writing from beyond the empire’s bounds, see no legitimacy in any of its institutions. Clearly echoing Korais’s diagnosis of a national ‘regeneration’ already under way and crying out to be completed, the book ends with repeated calls for the ‘restoration of the nation’.23
The anonymous author has more to say than either of his predecessors about ways and means, and about the practical resources available to the ‘enslaved Hellenes’ that might help them regain their liberty. Among these are the ‘character’ and ‘morals’ of the Greeks themselves. Again echoing Korais, he insists that these have not been vitiated or diluted, despite the subjection of so many generations to the tyranny of foreign masters, going all the way back to the ancient Romans. In this he anticipates nineteenth-century ideas of ‘national character’. Elsewhere, he draws on recent history to argue that some of his contemporaries still possess the fighting spirit of the ancient Spartans, who had defied the invading Persians to the last man at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. He cites episodes of heroic resistance by the mountain-dwelling Souliots against the campaigns of Ali Pasha over the past twenty years that were already becoming legendary. In the Souliots, he declares, may be seen the ‘heroes and the honour of enslaved Greece, the starting point and facilitator of her coming liberation’. Then there are the mountain brigands, the klefts. The propensity of these men to wage guerrilla warfare had already attracted the admiration of Rigas. The author of Hellenic Nomarchy goes further, and is perhaps the first to extol the moral virtues he attributes to those outlaws, portraying them already as embryonic freedom fighters and the nucleus of a native fighting force that they would indeed become.24
Resources from abroad will be important too. But these are not the expected ones. We would be foolish to trust foreign governments to come to our aid, the author warns, because they are all of them run by ‘tyrants’, in their own self-interest. Why exchange one tyranny for another? This is a sideswipe at imperial Russia and the new French empire of Napoleon, although neither is named. The author places his hopes not in foreigners but in those Greeks, himself presumably included, who are studying or engaged in commerce in foreign countries – and to whom his book seems most of all to be addressed. He urges them at some length to go home and devote to the fatherland the skills they have acquired abroad. Another source of strength can be found in the very weakness of their enemies. The anonymous author of Hellenic Nomarchy is probably the first writing in Greek to draw attention to what would soon, in the west, become known as the ‘Eastern Question’. The Ottoman Empire is so rotten within, it is ripe for the taking, he assures his readers. Earlier, he had produced statistics to show that, in many of its regions, the Orthodox Christian population amounted to some 80 per cent: the Greeks were not even outnumbered!25
Something else that is new in this work, and a harbinger of divisions that would lie in the future, is its strong denunciation of internal enemies. The fellow merchant who had betrayed Rigas turns out to have been only the least of these. The anonymous author reserves some of his harshest words for the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church. Hellenic Nomarchy is one of the few Greek tracts of any period to echo the anti-clericalism of the revolutionaries in France. From the Ecumenical Patriarch (a ‘ludicrous title’), through the corrupt workings of the Holy Synod, down to the ignorance and petty abuses of monks, the author has nothing but contempt for the clergy. Not only are they ignorant and self-seeking, but as part of the Ottoman system they are also traitors. The same goes for the Phanariot class and the primates. These are people who:
for the greater unhappiness of our nation, an evil chance has made Hellenes, and have only been born upon Hellenic land, for no other purpose than to lengthen the time of our fatherland’s slavery.
This, of course, was not how members of those elites were accustomed to think of themselves. The very concept of ‘Hellenic land’ would have seemed bizarre to most of them. People such as these, the author concludes grimly, ‘will serve as examples of shame for those who come after’.26
We have been warned. The Greek revolutionary project, like all revolutionary projects, will be under threat from some of the most powerfully placed individuals and groups that it aspires to represent. The inclusive charter imagined by Rigas, the anonymous author’s hero, has gone for good.
SOMETHING GROWING IN THE DARK
How much impact could these ideas have had on the ground? Of the disparate Greek-speaking populations of peasants, fishermen, farmers and monks, how many would have been engaged by any or all of these revolutionary programmes? In the case of Rigas, the real substance of what he had proposed would lie buried in the Austrian archives for almost a century. The original editions of the unsigned polemical pamphlets by Korais and of Hellenic Nomarchy survive today in very few copies. On the other hand, all of these were clandestine publications. To possess them was dangerous. Many must have been confiscated, hidden or destroyed. It is impossible to know how widely they were read, or how often their contents were passed on by word of mouth during the years leading up to the Revolution of 1821. The twenty-five volumes of the Hellenic Library, which included Korais’s essays on education and language, were subsidized by a like-minded family of merchants and intended to circulate widely in the Ottoman Empire. These were not openly subversive and no attempt appears to have been made to suppress them. They were printed in runs of between a thousand and fifteen hundred, huge numbers for a Greek book at the time. Even if it is true that only half of those were actually distributed before the Revolution,27 that still leaves a significant number in circulation. And they must have had some influence, because by the early 1820s the idea of a national revival had taken firm root, at least among educated supporters of the Revolution. But what of the population at large?
A valuable source of information is once again the foreign travellers who wrote up their experiences, sometimes in great detail. During the first two decades of the new century, thanks in part to the Napoleonic Wars blocking their access to other parts of Europe, more British travellers than ever before passed through the lands that they loosely referred to as ‘Greece’. The twenty-one-year-old Lord Byron and his travelling companion John Cam Hobhouse first became aware of Korais, and the admiration in which he was held, while staying in the house of a local primate in the Peloponnese at the end of 1809. The very name of Rigas was sufficient to produce an ‘ecstasy’ in their host. From Hobhouse’s diary we know that the lines later translated and made famous by Byron were already being sung, to the tune of the ‘Marseillaise’, in the Peloponnese, only eleven years after Rigas’s execution:
Sons of the Greeks, arise!
The glorious hour’s gone forth,
And, worthy of such ties,
Display who gave us birth.
Sons of Greeks! let us go
In arms against the foe,
Till their hated blood shall flow
In a river past our feet.28
The words are probably not, in fact, by Rigas. But the association with his name is just as important. Violence was in the air by that December of 1809. And we have the word of these and other travellers that the tune of the French Revolutionary anthem was on the lips of many patriotically minded Greeks.
Other foreign visitors, too, were hearing the same sort of talk at about this time. Henry Holland, whose book was published in 1815, thought it ‘a matter of interesting speculation, whether a nation may not be created in this part of Europe, either through its own or foreign efforts, which may be capable of bearing a part in all the affairs and events of the civilized world’. On balance, and tentatively, based on the experience of several months travelling in the country in 1812, Holland concluded that it might.29
By the end of the first decade of the new century, it was evident that a seed of some kind had been fertilized and was growing. What it might lead to, and whether or not the new birth might be viable, or another stillbirth like the conspiracy of Rigas, nobody could tell. It was not just the Greeks who were being, in the expression of Korais, ‘awakened’. The spate of travel books published, particularly in London, between 1800 and 1821 had the effect of raising consciousness there too. To a lesser extent the same was true in France and among the German states. Far more now than during the previous century, the writers of these books dwelt on the present state of the countries they passed through and the condition of their inhabitants. The result was that not only among Orthodox Greek speakers but far away in Europe, too, the sort of ‘speculation’ that had intrigued travellers such as Byron and Holland was beginning to grow.
In the west, Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage would prove enormously influential when its first two cantos appeared in 1812. The book was an instant publishing sensation. Its appearance marked the beginning of its author’s ‘years of fame’, as the first modern celebrity. But it was not just its author who ‘awoke to find [him]self famous’. Greece and the Greeks had overnight become famous too. The second canto of Childe Harold is the poetic travelogue of Byron’s ‘Grand Tour’ in Greek lands. Included with the poem were the results of his investigations and speculations on the present and future state of Greece. Childe Harold would be followed, over the next few years, by a succession of swashbuckling best-sellers in verse. Known as Byron’s ‘oriental’ or ‘Turkish tales’, all of them drew on his recent travels. These, as well as Childe Harold, would quickly be translated and admired all over Europe. Byron was not, at this time, a partisan for the Greeks (that would come later). Nothing that he wrote until after 1821 speaks out directly in favour of a Greek revolution. But in the minds of his readers, wherever they lived, the question had suddenly become topical. Could some kind of a Greek revival be possible, after all?
No such questions troubled the deliberations of the hard-headed politicians, monarchs, their advisers and diplomats who met, between November 1814 and June 1815, at the Congress of Vienna to determine the shape of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. An essential article of the ‘Concert of Europe’ that would emerge from the Congress was the permanence of the frontiers that had been re-established at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed it was Klemens von Metternich, Chancellor of Austria and the chief architect of these arrangements, who a few years later would notoriously deny the existence of Italy as anything more than a ‘geographical expression’. The Ottoman Empire was not represented at the Congress. The future of its European provinces seems not to have been on anyone’s agenda there. But the principle that the boundaries of states throughout Europe could not be changed without the agreement of four (later five) Great Powers was implicitly extended to the Ottoman Empire too. By the time of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the future of the entire continent had been set in stone. Speculation was for poets and fantasists. This was the reality.
In the meantime, among Greek-educated elites the project for a Greek revival was quietly gathering momentum. Collaborative ventures, such as newspapers and learned societies, became more frequent. The first Greek newspaper had been established in Vienna as long ago as 1790. It had lasted for seven years, until the discovery of Rigas’s conspiracy gave the authorities the excuse to close it down, although the newspaper itself had not been subversive. The year 1811 saw the establishment of its most authoritative and longest-lasting successor, the Learned Mercury. Appearing for the most part fortnightly over the next ten years, this attracted contributions from the leading figures in Greek education at the time. The subject matter of the newspaper was mainly ‘philological’, certainly not in any overt sense political. But many of those who contributed would later play their part among the intellectual leaders of the Revolution.
Among societies, the most prominent was the Philomuse Society, first established in Athens in 1813. One of its leading figures was Lord Byron’s former tutor in modern Greek, Ioannis Marmarotouris. A parallel venture with the same name sprang up the following year in Vienna, and earned the patronage of Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, originally from Corfu but who at this time was attending the Congress of Vienna in the service of Tsar Alexander of Russia. All of these societies were at least overtly dedicated to the furtherance of education and the arts. To the extent that a Greek revival was also a political project, they had the potential to involve clandestine activity. But like the newspapers, they operated openly and their stated objectives were cultural rather than political.
Very different was the Society of Friends or Friendly Society, also known in English by its Greek name, Philiki Etairia. This was a secret society, dedicated to a war of liberation. A great deal has been written on the rituals, ranks and secret codes of the Society. Like other clandestine political groups elsewhere in Europe at the time, this one was based ultimately on Freemasonry. The place where it began is traditionally given as Odessa and the year as 1814. Odessa lay in the heart of the new ‘borderland’ that had opened up to the north of the Black Sea almost half a century before. Greek-speaking merchants had been encouraged to move there since the time of Catherine the Great, and now made up an influential community. In reality, the Society seems to have begun functioning as an organization only in 1817, and in Constantinople.30 Part of the mystique that its founders cultivated lay in exaggerating the extent of its links to Russia. Supporters were encouraged to believe that the Society had the backing of the Tsar’s government, which it did not. Liberation was the goal. But how was it to be achieved?
A series of rather wordy oaths sworn by initiates at different levels of the organization’s hierarchy give the most reliable contemporary evidence. The most substantive passage is this:
I swear that I will nurture in my heart unswerving hatred against the tyrants of my Fatherland, their supporters and those of like mind with them. I will act in every way towards their harm and towards their wholesale destruction, when the occasion should permit.
No room for compromise there. ‘Nation’ (ethnos), ‘fatherland’ and ‘liberty’ are frequently recurring terms. Members are described as ‘Hellenes’. Foreigners may not be admitted. The purpose of the organization is ‘the resurrection of our suffering Fatherland’. As once before in Rigas’s constitution, there is much about procedure, protocol and the secrets of the society – which even during the years of its clandestine existence seem to have not been particularly well kept.31
The importance of the Friendly Society was out of all proportion to the number of its members. It has been estimated that, up to the middle of 1820, this stood at no more than seven hundred, rising to somewhere between two and three thousand in the final months before the Revolution began. Just over a thousand names have been preserved in an incomplete record. Of those, only a single individual is recorded as belonging to the rural peasantry. So it was nothing like a mass movement.32 What is important about it, though, is the fact that it was an organization, and dedicated to revolution.
The nature of that organization was in some ways paradoxical. All the Society’s elaborate arcana were designed to convince initiates that they were entering a hierarchical structure. The higher you ascended, the more mysterious it became. The greatest mystery of all, to which only the chosen few ever had access, was the identity of the Archi or supreme leadership. This was the real purpose of the whole machinery of secrecy: not so much to protect the identities of these unimaginably high-placed individuals, but rather to conceal from the membership how lowly they were in reality. The real structure was not top-down at all, but bottom-up. The instigators of the conspiracy were men of the emerging commercial middle class, and none occupied a distinguished position within it. They nonetheless succeeded in recruiting a membership just over half of whom were merchants, with significant numbers of doctors, teachers and, in the somewhat special case of the Peloponnese, landowners and members of the Church hierarchy.
This left a void at the very top. There was no plausible, highly placed leader, ready to take command when the moment for action came. None of the Society’s inner circle was remotely in a position to take on this role. It was difficult enough for them even to gain access to the kind of person they needed. The most influential Greek anywhere in the world at this time was the Corfiot Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, who in 1816 had been promoted to serve as one of the Tsar’s duo of foreign ministers. The initiated were encouraged to believe that he was indeed their hidden, unnameable leader. But despite repeated lobbying, Kapodistrias refused to have anything to do with the Society. Foreshadowing, in reverse, what would be said much later about the unification of Italy, Kapodistrias insisted, ‘First we must make Hellenes, and then make Hellas.’33
In itself, the existence of the Friendly Society was more likely a symptom than a cause. Similar secret societies existed in other parts of Europe at the time. Underlying all of them was discontent with the settlement that had been reached at Vienna in 1815. Revolutions did break out – in Spain in January 1820, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with its capital in Naples, in June of the same year, in Sardinia and Piedmont in 1821. But these were peaceful putsches by ‘constitutionalists’ demanding political reform, not the kind of all-out war that the secret societies plotted. All would prove short-lived. Revolutionary change in most of Europe would have to wait until 1848.
So why was it different in the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire that would soon become Greece? There too, it might be supposed, the time of violent upheavals was over. Within the empire, centralized power was being steadily reimposed from the top – although this may not yet have been fully apparent to many people on the ground. The French Revolution had come and gone. So had Napoleon and his conquests. To many of the Orthodox population, the lure of liberty must have looked as illusory as the Paternal Instruction had warned, back in 1798. But some things had changed for good. For one thing, in this part of the world, there was no stable status quo to go back to. The past fifty years or more had seen a continuing process of change. The uncertainties of the Napoleonic Wars had only increased the pace, and the level of uncertainty. The most fundamental change was in the way that people had begun to think about themselves. The fervour that had once been generated by liberté, égalité, fraternité may have died down, but far more people than ever before were coming to think of themselves as ‘Hellenes’. Korais, in his ‘Dissertation’ in Paris in 1803, had testified to the new custom among shipowners and captains for naming their vessels after ancient heroes. The same thing was beginning to happen with personal names too. The adoption of ancient Greek names alongside traditional baptismal ones was a sign of the same process.
A huge shift in consciousness was occurring. It cannot have been uniform. Many parts of the population remained barely touched by it, if at all. Others rejected it. Of those who espoused it, the most vociferous were those living outside the Ottoman Empire, or who had business connections that enabled them to come and go. This new, inchoate, unevenly distributed consciousness of ‘Hellenic’ identity did not, in itself, make the disparate communities of the eighteenth century any more homogeneous in the first decades of the nineteenth. If anything, the new ways of thinking fragmented them still further. But, no matter how individuals or whole communities tried to accommodate themselves to it, change was in the air.
This is not to say that changing consciousness was sufficient to cause a revolution. The kind of violent upheaval that was to come can have been actively wished for by very few, surely. That was the lesson of gradualists such as Korais and Kapodistrias. Even after hostilities had begun, there were those who would argue that the Revolution had been unnecessary, that the goal of Greek self-government could have been achieved without it. Why, then, did the Revolution happen? And why did it break out when it did? Between 1815 and 1821 three things came together that need not have done. They were intrinsically unconnected. It was the combination that would prove combustible.
The first of these was long-term, and economic. Shipping and overland commerce that had been in the hands of Orthodox Christians in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire had continued to do well during the Napoleonic Wars. With their end, commercial fleets belonging to western nations began to return to the eastern Mediterranean. This was the time of increasing protectionism by national governments. Greek merchant houses both in the empire and abroad were badly hit by these developments. One historian even likens the situation to the economic crisis in Greece today.34 Some of the foreign travellers noticed its effects too. Families and whole communities, which for two generations or more had been used to ever-increasing affluence, found their fortunes going into reverse. It was a failure of expectations. A generation was growing up in which it could no longer be taken for granted that the son would do better than his father, that the daughter would make a more advantageous marriage than her mother. In the worst case, destitution threatened. The best you could hope for was to hold your own. Half a century of upward mobility (for some) had come to an abrupt end. Individuals of means, determination and talent found themselves in a desperate situation.
That was not sudden. But it was insidious. Then, in the spring of 1820, two things happened that, between them, tilted the scales towards violence. Ali, the Albanian-speaking Muslim Pasha of Ioannina, came out in open revolt against the Ottoman Empire. And on 24 April the Friendly Society found the leader it had been looking for.