3
Born in Blood
1821–1833
It was, quite simply, a bloodbath.
To the extent that the Revolution had been planned, almost from the beginning events swung free of the planners’ control. The plans had been hastily laid in any case. It was not a campaign fought by leaders with objectives. It was not a war between states or even between clearly recognized groups within one state. Historians outside Greece have usually called it a ‘war of independence’. It was nothing so systematic. In Greek, traditionally, it is known as ‘the Revolution’, or more often just by the date, which resonates throughout all subsequent Greek history: ‘1821’.
Once the killing had started, it became a paroxysm, a manifestation of collective rage and fear that no power on earth could control. All sides (and there were many, in different places and at different times) resorted routinely to the most extreme violence imaginable. This was not war in its traditional sense of ‘the continuation of diplomacy by other means’. It was a descent into savagery. The rational, liberal values championed by the Enlightenment were often invoked. But throughout the regions affected, there was all too little sign of these values in action. The story of the Greek Revolution is not one of rational actions and reactions. What happened was more like a real birth, or a cataclysm in nature.
Victims of this violence were more often than not civilians and those unable to defend themselves. Both sides routinely murdered prisoners and hostages, of all ages and both sexes. Undertakings of safe conduct were usually broken, unless foreigners were present to try to enforce them. After a skirmish both sides would collect the severed heads of their victims as trophies. All who dealt in death, from the Ottoman state executioners down to the Christian mobs that fell upon Muslim captives, suffered the same compulsion to compound the ultimate penalty with gratuitous forms of humiliation, sometimes too with hideous and prolonged suffering. It has been estimated that by 1828 the civilian population of the regions that would make up the Greek state had been reduced by 20 per cent since the outbreak of hostilities. Destruction of crops, flocks, mills and houses – the means of livelihood for an agricultural population – was on an even greater scale, up to 90 per cent in the case of livestock.1 By the time it was over, no Muslims remained in most of those regions. Minarets were demolished, mosques turned into warehouses, town halls or (much later) cinemas. Often, today, only their orientation towards Mecca, at variance with the surrounding buildings, gives a clue to their original purpose. Monuments or inscriptions in the old Ottoman script, and gravestones or architecture from the Ottoman period, are hard to find throughout those parts of Greece that won their independence during the 1820s.
One of the first Greek historians of the conflict, writing a few decades afterwards, justified the behaviour of his compatriots on the grounds that ‘The misdeeds of the Greeks are lessons of the Turkish school and begotten of slavery.’2 Outside observers at the time were sceptical. Non-Greek accounts, more recently, have tended to show how symmetrical was the resort to extreme violence between the two sides. At the local level, this was undoubtedly true. But not all forms of violence were symmetrical. The Ottoman state established from the beginning a pattern of reprisals that probably exacerbated the threat it was attempting to control. Within a few weeks in April and May 1821 the work of more than a century was undone in the annihilation of the Phanariot class. Of all the executions carried out in Constantinople at that time, the most notorious was that of the aged Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, hanged from the gate of his own precinct on Easter Day, 22 April. More than a hundred prominent Phanariots were publicly beheaded in the city during those weeks.
It may have been a sign of panic on the part of the Ottoman government that these measures, disproportionate and indiscriminate as they were, were also damaging to the Ottomans’ own interests. For several years afterwards it would prove impossible for the Ottoman state to fill some of its highest offices that traditionally had been held by Phanariots. The same kind of self-harming paroxysm would surface again a year later, when the mastic-growing villages of the island of Chios were razed, as punishment for an incursion by Greek insurgents from another island. The massacres on Chios between April and June 1822 were compounded by another institutional form of reprisal that was built into the Ottoman system: slavery. Tens of thousands of women and children from Chios glutted the slave-markets of the Levant during the summer and autumn of 1822. These events shocked the whole of Europe, to be immortalized in the famous canvas by Eugène Delacroix, Scene of the Massacres of Scio, completed two years afterwards. But closer to home, the ladies of high society in Constantinople had been accustomed to chew the mastic that is intensively cultivated only on Chios and which possesses medicinal properties. Now, thanks to Ottoman vengeance, they would have to do without.
By contrast, on the Greek side, there was no comparable state authority to carry out acts of punishment or reprisal on such a scale. Neither the Provisional Government nor the local leaders who exercised power in their regions would usually issue orders for atrocities to be carried out. Slavery, at least in theory, was outlawed by the Provisional Constitution of 1822. The fact that so many atrocities did take place has been attributed to a failure of leadership. George Finlay, normally the most judicious and still the most authoritative historian of the Revolution, is particularly scathing about the inability of even such powerful warlords as Theodoros Kolokotronis or Petrobey Mavromichalis to check them. But these leaders were anything but weak. They knew the men they commanded. As leaders, they understood the basis on which they enjoyed their men’s trust and how fragile it was. Terms of surrender would be violated in Tripolitsa in October 1821 and in Athens in July 1822, on a scale that appalled Europe no less than did the Ottoman atrocities on Chios. But one must wonder whether any Greek leader, however talented and charismatic, could have restrained the mass bloodlust that broke out on those occasions, without immediately forfeiting all his authority.
Finlay believed that the ‘true glory of the Greek Revolution lies in the indomitable energy and unwearied perseverance of the mass of the people’.3 He had experienced the Revolution at first hand, and by the time he wrote his history had lived most of his life in independent Greece. His view has tended to prevail since. But even the canny Scot, whose personal motto was ‘I’ll be wary’, romanticizes here. The grim truth must be that it was Finlay’s hero, the ‘mass of the people’ themselves, driven no doubt by the most primitive human instincts under extreme conditions, who collectively fell victim to the pathology of violence – a pathology that infected Christian and Muslim populations alike. Out of this frenzy of terror, mutual hatred and bloodletting, the Greek nation state would in due course be born.
THE END OF THE FRIENDLY SOCIETY
Alexandros Ypsilantis (also spelt Hypsilantes) was the eldest son of a former prince of Wallachia who had fled to Russia at the start of the Russo-Turkish war in 1806. There Alexandros had received a military education and gone on to serve with distinction in the Russian campaigns against Napoleon. He had lost his right arm in a battle outside Dresden. Since then he had served as a member of the Russian delegation at the Congress of Vienna. By all accounts, Alexandros Ypsilantis enjoyed the confidence of Tsar Alexander. More recently, despite being no longer fit for active service, he had been promoted to major-general in the imperial army. He was now, conveniently for the emissaries of the Friendly Society, on leave. This was the man who in April 1820, aged twenty-seven, agreed to fill the vacuum at the top of the Society’s ranks and become its long-sought leader. By the end of 1820, Ypsilantis had set up a secret headquarters at Kishinev (today’s Chișinău, capital of Moldova), then just inside Russian territory and close to the border with Ottoman-controlled Moldavia.
Suddenly, to the minds of the Society’s members, it seemed there was no time like the present. A leader was to hand. Ottoman forces were already on their way to lay siege to the rebel Ali Pasha in his capital at Ioannina. The whole of Roumeli (the mainland north of the Peloponnese) was becoming engulfed by a local war between competing Muslim powers: Ali versus the centralized authority of the Sultan. It seemed like the perfect moment to strike. But where, and how? At first the plan was to follow the example of Rigas. Ypsilantis was to go in disguise to Trieste and from there take ship for the Peloponnese. This was the one region where the Society’s emissaries had been successful in recruiting most of the local Christian landowners, the ‘primates’, to the cause. Who knows how different the fortunes of Ypsilantis and the Friendly Society, or indeed the course of the Revolution, might have been if he had followed this advice? But at the last minute the plan changed. The Peloponnesians could make their own arrangements. The banner of revolt would be raised in the Danubian principalities instead.
Wearing Russian uniform and accompanied by only a handful of retainers, Alexandros Ypsilantis entered Ottoman territory by boat across the river Pruth on 6 March 1821. By evening of the same day he had reached Jassy, the capital of Moldavia. There he was made welcome by the Phanariot prince – who thereby reneged on his allegiance to his sovereign, the Sultan. Two days later a proclamation was printed, which in due course would be translated and published in the newspapers of Europe.
The Greek Revolution had begun.
By the end of his first day in Moldavia, Ypsilantis had already gathered a force of two hundred local supporters in arms. Within a week this number had quadrupled. By June, his army had swelled to something between five and eight thousand, including upwards of two thousand cavalry. This was a remarkable achievement in itself. Almost all of these had been locally recruited in the two principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Despite what the Ottoman authorities assumed, only a handful of Ypsilantis’s officers, and no fighting troops, had accompanied him from Russia.
Even more remarkable was the composition of this army. At its heart lay a corps of five hundred educated Greeks from all parts of Europe – the very people who had once been addressed by the anonymous author of Hellenic Nomarchy. Known as the Sacred Battalion, they wore a black uniform and marched under a banner in Rigas’s colours – red, white and black – but with a new symbol, the phoenix rising from the fire, and the slogan ‘Out of my ashes I am reborn’. Far more numerous were willing recruits from all the language groups (or ethnicities) of the Balkans: Serbs and Bulgarians, Albanians and Vlachs (Romanians), Cossacks from the border regions with Russia. For the one and only time in history, this was the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ in arms. Had it succeeded, Rigas’s vision of a cosmopolitan ‘Hellenic Republic’ might have become a reality.
But Ypsilantis’s enterprise was fatally flawed. The Friendly Society had been founded on the premise that its leadership enjoyed the support of Russia. But this had never been true. Ypsilantis may have believed that his own personal standing with the Tsar and his court would be enough to bring about a change. But with the worst possible timing, news of the revolt in Moldavia reached Tsar Alexander at Laibach (today’s Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia), where he was attending one of the regular congresses of the ‘Concert of Europe’. There, of all places, in the company of the representatives of the other Great Powers, it would have been unthinkable for the Russian autocrat to endorse a revolution in a neighbouring country. The purpose of these congresses was after all to reinforce the status quo that had been established in 1815. Tsar Alexander summarily dismissed Ypsilantis from the imperial service and stripped him of all his ranks and titles. He even went so far as to offer his support to the Ottoman government in putting down the rebellion.
Even then, Ypsilantis did all he could to keep up the pretence: the Tsar only said these things for show. Secretly, Ypsilantis claimed, his master had sent assurances that Russian aid would soon be on its way. But much of the momentum had been taken out of the campaign. The end came swiftly. On 19 June, at the battle of Dragashan, in Wallachia, the troops of the Friendly Society were routed by a much smaller Ottoman force. Ypsilantis slipped over the frontier to claim refuge in Austrian territory. The survivors of the army he had raised in the principalities were left to fend for themselves. Some fought on to the end, others were captured and executed. Ypsilantis himself was interned by the Austrians. A broken man, he would only just survive beyond the end of his incarceration, to die at the age of thirty-five.
The Greek Revolution in the Danubian principalities had been an ignominious failure.
In the meantime, at the southern end of the Balkan peninsula and in the Aegean, events had taken a very different turn. In the Peloponnese, and on the islands that were home to the biggest merchant fleets, local leaders had heeded the call of the Friendly Society in larger numbers than anywhere else. The reasons for this are not entirely clear. One may well have been the financial difficulties experienced by these groups at the time. For the islanders, trade had been bad since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. On the mainland, the wealthy landowners who depended on exports of products such as currants and silk were struggling too. Urged on by the representatives of the Society, some of these men were now prepared to tear up the decades-old agreements with the Ottoman authorities that had won them their privileges in the first place, and make common cause with former brigands such as Theodoros Kolokotronis, who now began to return from enforced exile in the Ionian islands.
As soon as news began to spread of Ypsilantis’s revolt in Moldavia, uprisings in the Peloponnese broke out spontaneously in several places at once. The emissaries of the Friendly Society had originally set 25 March 1821 (6 April in the Western calendar) for the start of the Revolution. The date has symbolic resonance, as it coincides with the religious festival of the Annunciation. Ever since, 25 March has been commemorated as Greece’s national day. But the oft-repeated legend that Bishop Germanos of Old Patras raised the standard of revolt on that day in the Monastery of Agia Lavra, high in the mountains above Kalavryta, is just that. The first towns in the Peloponnese to declare themselves free of Ottoman rule were Kalamata in the south and Patras in the north. Others soon followed. By the middle of April the whole region was in revolt.
This was not an organized military campaign, such as Ypsilantis had attempted in the principalities. It was guerrilla warfare, usually on a small scale. The leaders were local ‘primates’ and former brigands, aided after the first months by a steady trickle of idealistic volunteers from abroad, of whom more will be said later. With little coordination or agreement among guerrilla bands, in the mountainous terrain of the Peloponnese this kind of insurgency proved devastatingly effective.
Even now, not all the regional populations where Greek speakers predominated were ready to declare for the Revolution. In Roumeli, to the north, the situation was complicated by the Muslim-on-Muslim conflict between Ali Pasha and the Sultan’s forces. In this part of the country, armed militias made up of Christians had for decades been recruited to keep banditry in check, largely from among the same brigands that they were meant to control. These militias had evolved a fluid system of switching allegiance among local centres of power. For as long as Ali held out in Ioannina, some of these bands could be bought over to his side, others by the Ottoman army. It was not until the summer that most of the local militias had come round to the new Greek cause. But as long as the Revolution lasted, many would never entirely give up their habit of making tactical alliances to secure their own local power bases.
Of key importance was the richest of the naval islands, Hydra, which joined the Revolution only after a coup d’état against the traditional oligarchy of shipowners. By the time the shipowners had regained control, there was no going back on the island’s commitment to the Revolution. The fleets of armed merchantmen from Hydra, nearby Spetses and Psara on the other side of the Aegean, soon joined forces and proved more than a match for the Ottoman fleet. Particularly deadly, and particularly feared by the Ottoman sailors, were the Greek fireships – old hulks that would be coated in pitch, set alight and expertly set on course to collide with their targets, before the sailors abandoned them in small boats and escaped to safety. Within a few months these irregular fleets had all but gained control of the Aegean. Although they never quite managed to impose blockades sufficient to prevent enemy movements by sea, from the summer of 1821 onwards they were able to strike with impunity anywhere in the Aegean and even right round the coast, in the Ionian Sea to the west.
On many of the smaller Aegean islands, where Ottoman authority had always fallen more lightly than on the mainland, enthusiasm was more muted. The Roman Catholic communities established since the later Middle Ages on many of the Cyclades, including Syros, Tinos and Santorini, declined to risk their lives and livelihoods by supporting their Orthodox compatriots. Further north, on the mainland, on Mount Pelion, which for decades had been a centre of commerce and learning, an outbreak was quickly suppressed. The hinterland of Salonica rebelled too. Here Ottoman reprisals were especially grim, but also effective. The same excessive measures that in the south served only to inflame revolutionary fervour, farther north had the opposite effect.
To the south and east, the Christians of Crete and of Samos enthusiastically joined the Revolution, though in the event neither island would become part of independent Greece until the twentieth century. In two other large islands in the Aegean, Lesbos and Chios, the Christian populations resolutely tried to avoid becoming embroiled – the former successfully, the latter not – with the catastrophic consequences already described. Revolts on the coast of Anatolia, at Ayvalık and Smyrna, were suppressed. Furthest away of all, on the island of Cyprus, where nobody rebelled, the leading churchmen were executed anyway, on the mere suspicion of having been in cahoots with the Friendly Society.
By the end of 1821, the countryside throughout the Peloponnese and the southern part of Roumeli had been subjected to what today would be termed ‘ethnic cleansing’. Those Muslims who had not fled, been killed or, in a few high-ranking cases, ransomed, had taken refuge in a string of fortresses that went back to Crusader or Byzantine times. The decisive victory of the first year of the war was the submission of the fortified town of Tripolitsa, the capital of the Morea, in early October. After the town had capitulated, some eight thousand Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were slaughtered. In the language of the time, all Muslims were described as ‘Turks’, irrespective of what today would be called their ethnicity. Many of those killed, including probably all of the Jews, will have spoken Greek as their first language, most of the Muslims either Greek or Albanian. It was religion that determined who was to live and who to die. By the end of 1821 the nature of the conflict had been irreversibly defined. So, too, was the geographical heartland of the Revolution, which after many intervening changes of fortune would emerge more or less as the territory of the first independent Greek state at the start of the 1830s.
By this time its leadership had already passed into a new phase. Many, perhaps all, of those who had struck the first blows in March and April 1821 had been members of the Friendly Society. But the Society as an organization had become bogged down with Ypsilantis in the campaign that would soon fail so disastrously in Wallachia in the north. In the Peloponnese, there was no direction from the top. No single authority was in charge. It was not until June that the Society’s plenipotentiary arrived in liberated Greece, to claim control of events on its behalf. This was the younger brother of Alexandros Ypsilantis, Dimitrios. He too, like his brother, had a background in the Russian imperial army. Aged just twenty-five when he disembarked at Hydra, the younger Ypsilantis was received with rapturous enthusiasm – since it was believed that he brought with him the promise of Russian aid. Even the paramount warlords of the Morea, the warrior-chieftain of the Mani, Petrobey Mavromichalis, and the fifty-one-year-old former brigand Theodoros Kolokotronis, were prepared to place themselves under his command.
Sadly for Dimitrios Ypsilantis, the day of his arrival at Hydra was also the day of his brother’s crushing defeat at Dragashan. It would not be long before the news had filtered through to the Peloponnese, where Dimitrios had in the meantime established his headquarters. Once it was known that the elder Ypsilantis had deserted the cause and sought refuge in Austria, and that the arrival of the younger did not signal a benign change in Russian policy, not only was it impossible for Dimitrios to assert the authority that he claimed on behalf of the Friendly Society, but the Society itself was beginning to seem like an irrelevance. Worse, it could even be seen as an embarrassment.
Enter the man who would do more than any other, in the early years at least, to shape the direction to be taken by the future Greek state. A descendant of the first and most distinguished of the Phanariot princes to rule in the Danubian principalities during the previous century, and still only in his late twenties, Alexandros Mavrokordatos had gained political experience in the service of his uncle, who had recently served the Sultan as prince of Wallachia. Mavrokordatos was one of a significant number among the leaders of the Revolution who had never previously visited the lands they were fighting for – a source of resentment for some among those that they led. Highly intelligent and a speaker of eight languages, Mavrokordatos immediately stood out as the only man of consequence in Greece who wore a European frock coat – while Dimitrios Ypsilantis, like his brother, sported imperial Russian uniform and almost everybody else (often including Western volunteers) dressed in the local Ottoman style. Mavrokordatos was a politician to his fingertips – and we will meet him again.
In the aftermath of the sack of Tripolitsa in October, while regional leaders jockeyed for power and influence, momentum was gathering for a general assembly of the whole liberated nation to take place. Dimitrios Ypsilantis encouraged this development, in the expectation that it would set the seal on his own supremacy. Mavrokordatos encouraged it too, but with a different goal in mind. While this assembly was in preparation, in early November, Mavrokordatos wrote at length and with remarkable candour to the chief representative of the Friendly Society. It was the mistakes made by the Society that had:
aroused against us all the European Powers, which quite rightly thought we were the instruments of the Jacobins of Europe. These things alienated Russia, who in every other circumstance could willingly have aided us.
The answer, according to Mavrokordatos, was:
to leave behind titles of ‘leaders’ and ‘plenipotentiaries’ and ‘aides’, to organize government by the local people themselves, under our guidance so far as possible … to leave behind whatever makes the European Powers suspect us of Jacobin leanings … to lay our just demands before Europe not with swollen words, but laconically as worthy of our ancestors and with moderation.
Above all, Mavrokordatos urged, it was imperative to ‘do everything possible to bring people together in unity, so as to form the government’.4
The assembly duly took place. It ended with the proclamation of the first Provisional Constitution of independent Greece, near the site of the ancient sanctuary of Epidaurus, on 13 January 1822 (New Year’s day according to the Orthodox calendar). This document drew heavily, just as Rigas’s had done, on the French Revolutionary constitutions of 1793 and 1795. It established the name of the new country as Hellas and its citizens as Hellenes. Following the doctrine of the separation of powers that had first been implemented in the United States of America, it established an Executive and a Legislative Corps. Voted president of the first (on the American analogy, head of state) was Alexandros Mavrokordatos. President of the second (roughly equivalent to the US Speaker of the House of Representatives) was Dimitrios Ypsilantis. The Provisional Constitution makes no mention of the Friendly Society. At the same time, the red, white and black tricolour of Rigas was replaced by the blue and white colours, though not yet the design, of what would become the present-day Greek flag.
There was no mistaking who had come out on top.
From a practical point of view, this first Provisional Constitution would remain largely a dead letter. George Finlay, writing four decades later, would set the tone for historians who came after him: ‘A good deal was done by the Greeks at Epidaurus to deceive Europe; very little to organise Greece.’5 In many ways it was a deception. What the Provisional Constitution proclaimed was far more aspiration than practical policy, as all who set their names to it would have known very well. But from a political point of view, it was also a necessary deception, if a revolutionary movement was ever going to win acceptance in the climate of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Friendly Society had served its purpose. The Revolution was now on its way to becoming what one historian has more recently termed ‘a European event’.6
WHAT KIND OF FREEDOM?
All this time, the Revolution in the south had benefited from the continuing campaign by the Ottoman army, further north, to subdue the rebellion of Ali Pasha. But in January 1822 the Sultan’s troops entered Ioannina, Ali’s capital. The veteran ‘Muslim Bonaparte’, as Lord Byron had styled him, was murdered by one of his captors on 5 February. The rebellion was over. The considerable military force that the Ottoman government had thrown into this conflict was now available to settle the affairs of the Greeks, and was already on their doorstep in strength. The first concerted counter-attack against the fledgling Greek state was launched with massive strength in July 1822.
One part of the Ottoman army marched south through eastern Roumeli and into the Peloponnese. Its aim was to relieve the besieged Ottoman garrisons of Corinth and Nafplio, join up with them and subdue the country in between. Another moved down the western side of the Pindos mountain range. Here the principal target was the trading port of Missolonghi, on which Mavrokordatos had concentrated his activities since his arrival the year before. Here too were besieged Ottoman outposts to be relieved, at Lepanto (today’s Nafpaktos) and the Castle of Roumeli (today’s Antirrio). In both campaigns the Greeks were heavily outnumbered.
In the west the Ottoman command had been assigned to Ali Pasha’s replacement. Omer Vryonis, the new Pasha of Ioannina, had none of his predecessor’s ambition, but would prove adept over the next few years at harrying the insurgent Greeks and exploiting the fluid loyalties of the local Greek- and Albanian-speaking militias. One of the few relatively conventional pitched battles of the war was fought on 16 July 1822. Vryonis’s forces were met by a regular Greek force, made up of volunteers from western Europe and the Ionian islands, under the command of Mavrokordatos, outside the town and strategic river crossing of Arta at a place called Peta. The battle was a wipe-out. The foreign volunteers, sticking rigidly to their Western training, would not act without orders from their commander-in-chief, who was absent. The irregular militias, supposed to be providing cover in the hills, were impervious to orders from anyone and simply disappeared. The battle of Peta was a terrible blow to the Revolution, but even more so to the morale of those idealistic volunteers from abroad who had already begun arriving to join the cause. Most of all, it cast a blight on the whole concept of regular warfare and set back the creation of a national army, under a single command, for years.
On the other side of the country, the outcome was dramatically different. Mahmud Dramali, at the head of an Ottoman force some twenty thousand strong, including eight thousand cavalry, succeeded in penetrating into the Peloponnese. Here, resistance was in the hands of Kolokotronis and the local guerrilla ‘captains’. Against all expectations, they prevented the attackers from entering Nafplio, and then decimated them in an ambush during their retreat north through the pass of Dervenakia. Coming just ten days after the defeat at Peta, this was a resounding vindication for the irregular tactics and ruthless methods of the guerrillas. Although many others played their part too, including the now eclipsed Dimitrios Ypsilantis, chief credit for the success at Dervenakia has generally gone to Kolokotronis. Justified or not (Finlay thought not), it certainly boosted that leader’s political position among the other Greeks. By the late summer of 1822 no significant military threat to the Greeks existed down the entire eastern side of the country.
It took longer to secure the western flank. Mavrokordatos would redeem himself, in the months that followed the disaster at Peta, by his defence of the chief town of the region, Missolonghi. The surviving forces that remained loyal had regrouped there. Aided by torrential rain, by the arrival of ships from Hydra and by their own sheer determination, the defenders succeeded in breaking the Ottoman siege on 6 January 1823, which was Christmas Day according to the Orthodox calendar. This was the first of no fewer than three sieges that over the course of the war would make the name of Missolonghi famous throughout all of Europe. The end of this first siege meant that by the start of 1823 the precariously emerging Greek state had won itself a breathing space.
For reasons largely outside the insurgents’ control, this breathing space would last a full two years. True, skirmishing on the borders continued throughout this period. Borders, except in the Peloponnese, were in any case porous and shifting. Outlying islands were especially vulnerable. Whole populations would be wiped out on Psara and Kasos in the summer of 1824. The same year would see the Ottomans regain control of Crete. But with these notable exceptions, from the beginning of 1823 until the spring of 1825, insurgent Greece enjoyed a period of relative security.
But not of peace. The stage was now set for an internal reckoning among the Greeks themselves. All could unite under the banner, ‘Liberty or Death’. But now that it had been won, what was this ‘liberty’, exactly? What kind of freedom were they to enjoy in future?
One answer was based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. Mavrokordatos and those who thought like him were determined to promote a programme for centralized government, for modern, progressive institutions, the rule of law, democratic accountability – all of which had been enshrined in the Epidaurus Constitution (dismissed by Finlay and others as a ‘deception’). For these men, the task was to turn that aspiration into reality. Historians today most often call this group ‘modernizers’. Against them were ranged the traditional values and outlook of the local leaders collectively known as ‘warlords’. For men such as Kolokotronis and Mavromichalis, freedom meant absolute self-sufficiency, the refusal to acknowledge any authority other than their own. Among their ranks, the leader was the strongest and the most charismatic, and the leader’s word was law. Their power bases were local, or at the most regional. They had no great interest in widening the conflict, still less in encouraging foreign intervention – though they tended, not entirely consistently, to make an exception for Russia. Theirs was the concept of freedom captured in the oral tradition, in the songs of the klefts that first began to be collected, published and translated at just this time, and have been performed at national celebrations ever since.
These divisions came out into the open during April 1823. The occasion was a second National Assembly, held not far from Nafplio at a place known locally as ‘St John’s Huts’ and for the occasion restored to its ancient name of Astros. New elections placed executive power in the hands of the most prominent warlords, Mavromichalis and Kolokotronis. Mavrokordatos was reduced to an ambiguous position. This reached the point of absurdity when Kolokotronis bullied him out of accepting the position of the President of the Legislative Corps, to which he had been elected. The separation of powers was not working well.
For several months, in late 1823 and early 1824, Greece had two governments, each attempting to face down the other from a different power base. Between March and June 1824 forces loyal to the rival governments took the field against one another. After an uneasy truce, and some opportunistic realignment of the contending parties, a second civil war broke out in the Peloponnese in November. One of the highest-profile casualties of these events was Kolokotronis’s eldest son Panos, killed in battle by fellow Greeks outside Tripolitsa. Another, indirectly, was the most famous of all the foreign volunteers who came to Greece to aid the cause, Lord Byron.
Byron’s death at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824 created a legend – but also served to obscure ever afterwards what had been his real contribution to the Greek struggle. Byron, too, arriving in Greece when he did, had to face the same dilemma as confronted the rival Greek leaders: what kind of freedom had he come to fight for? Having carefully weighed the alternatives, Byron opted to throw his celebrity reputation and his personal wealth behind Mavrokordatos and the modernizing shipowners of Hydra and Spetses. Byron lasted for only three months in independent Greece before succumbing to fever. But his strategic choice, and the flow of funds and the immense international publicity that came with it, had important consequences. One was that the second siege of Missolonghi was lifted at the end of 1823, without a shot being fired, on the mere report that the English lord had financed a squadron of Greek ships for the town’s relief. Of even greater significance, in the long run, was Byron’s decisive support for the modernizers against the warlords of the Peloponnese in the conflict that would drag on for the rest of the year.
By the start of 1825, the authority of a single, centralized government had been assured. In the process, the political leadership of the modernizers had passed from Mavrokordatos to a new figure. Ioannis Kolettis, now entering his fifties, had proved himself to be more ruthless and less squeamish during the civil wars than Mavrokordatos, when it came to directing the use of force against fellow Greeks. Kolettis had been born in Ali Pasha’s fiefdom into a Vlach-speaking community. Taking advantage of the Greek education available through the Orthodox Church, he had gone on to study medicine in Italy and returned to serve as a court physician in Ioannina. There, Kolettis had learnt all about the intrigues necessary for survival in the court of Ali Pasha, and no doubt much also about his master’s complex diplomacy with the rival powers of Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars. In this way, Kolettis managed to combine a political legacy from Ali Pasha with a Western, modernizing outlook. From this time until his death in 1847, Kolettis and Mavrokordatos would remain bitter political rivals on the same, broadly modernizing side. More of a populist than the intellectually accomplished Mavrokordatos could ever be, it was more often than not Kolettis who would have the edge.
According to the bold reassessment of one Greek historian, writing in the twenty-first century, ‘it was the outcome of the civil war that saved the Greek Revolution’.7 In the sense that it determined the future shape and direction of the Greek nation state, this was true. But the price of that outcome was to open up a fault line in the fabric of Greek society that has never, since, gone away. On one side are the descendants of the ‘modernizers’ of the 1820s: political, statist, pragmatic and integrationist. Ranged on the other are traditionalists, nostalgic for the absolute freedom celebrated in the songs of the klefts and the brief moments of glorious self-sufficiency enjoyed by some of the warlords during the Revolution. Much that has happened in subsequent Greek history can only be explained or understood in terms of these dynamics, which first emerged during the struggle out of which the nation state was born.
But first, if the Revolution was to be saved, it had to survive.
ALL BUT EXTINGUISHED
No sooner had the modernizing central government gained the upper hand in the internal struggle with the warlords than the long-awaited Ottoman counter-attack began. Its effects would soon prove deadly. Back in 1822, the Sultan had relied on a two-pronged attack by land from the north. That strategy had failed. In 1825 the assault was renewed not only through the familiar land routes, but simultaneously from the south, by sea. Key players in this part of the story are Muhammad Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, and his son Ibrahim. Muhammad Ali had begun life as Mehmet, an Albanian-speaking Muslim from Kavala, in the north of today’s Greece. A decade earlier he had deposed and eliminated the Mameluke dynasty that for several centuries had ruled Egypt as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. During the intervening years, Muhammad Ali had thoroughly overhauled and modernized his armed forces along European lines, with some assistance from the West, particularly from France. Sultan and viceroy determined to work together to exterminate the threat from Greece. The Ottoman navy, based in Constantinople, was reinforced by a second fleet of transports and fighting ships from Alexandria, under the command of Muhammad Ali’s son Ibrahim, who was appointed Pasha of the Morea.
Ibrahim began landing troops from Egypt at Modon (today’s Methoni, in the southwest Peloponnese) on 23 February 1825. The twin fortresses in that area, Modon and Coron, had remained in Ottoman hands throughout the war. Relieving the garrisons, Ibrahim’s fifty ships brought reinforcements on a scale not seen in this theatre of the war so far. A swift campaign drove the Greeks out of the neighbouring stronghold of Navarino, in an action that nearly cost Mavrokordatos his life. The anchorage of Navarino Bay, between the mainland and the island of Sphaktiria, for the next two years would provide a secure base for the combined fleets from Alexandria and Constantinople.
Meanwhile, to the north, a new commander-in-chief had replaced Omer Vryonis. Reshid Pasha, who had played a leading role in the battle of Peta, laid siege to Missolonghi at the end of April 1825. It was the beginning of the third, and final, siege that would last a whole year. Desultory fighting in the rest of southern Roumeli led to the collapse of the Greeks almost everywhere north of the Isthmus of Corinth. Only Missolonghi in the west and the Acropolis of Athens in the east still held out, and both were under close siege by the Ottomans. While Reshid and other local pashas ravaged Roumeli, Ibrahim embarked upon the systematic reconquest of the Peloponnese, burning and destroying crops and villages as he went. By the end of the summer of 1825 the Greeks had been forced to abandon Tripolitsa. At the height of Ibrahim’s advance, Egyptian troops came within sight of the Greek stronghold and temporary capital of Nafplio. As George Finlay drily summed it up, ‘The Egyptians carried on a war of extermination; the Greeks replied by a war of brigandage.’ The result, he thought, must have seemed inevitable: ‘Famine would soon consume those who escaped the sword.’8
Towards the end of 1825 all the efforts of both sides came to be concentrated on the besieged town of Missolonghi. On the Ottoman side, Ibrahim now joined forces with Reshid in Roumeli. The town was blockaded by both land and sea. For months Greek ships from Hydra and Spetses ran the blockade to keep the defenders supplied. Volunteers from Zante in the Ionian islands, officially proscribed from doing so by the British, who ruled the islands, contributed too. Hard pressed in its remaining stronghold of Nafplio, the Greek government was powerless to intervene, except by trying to raise money to keep the defenders supplied. But inexorably the noose tightened.
By mid-April 1826 the only choices facing those inside were to starve to death, to surrender or to try to break out. They chose the last. The attempt was made on the night of Palm Sunday, 22 April. It was an act of doomed heroism. Out of a population estimated at some nine thousand that had survived the siege so far, fewer than two thousand escaped with their lives. ‘Ibrahim boasted of having taken 3000 heads, and from 3000 to 4000 women and children were made slaves.’ Several hundred who were too weak to leave the town took a last refuge in the house of Christos Kapsalis, where Byron had lived and died two years earlier, and which in the meantime had been turned into a gunpowder store. There, the story goes, seemingly by common consent, and so as not to fall into the hands of the enemy, the elderly Kapsalis himself lit the match and plunged it into a barrel of gunpowder, killing everyone inside.
Even the normally reserved Thomas Gordon, who had himself served with distinction in Greece and became one of the Revolution’s first historians, described the fall of Missolonghi as a ‘glorious tragedy’. George Finlay, soured by thirty years of living in the country whose struggles he had witnessed in his youth, paid this tribute to the defenders: ‘A spirit of Greek heroism, rare in the Greek Revolution – rare even in the history of mankind – pervaded every breast.’9 In Greek, the ‘Exodus of Missolonghi’ would soon become the stuff of epic poetry and monumental painting. Ever since, the event has been commemorated in biblical terms. In 1937 the Greek government bestowed on the municipality the title ‘Sacred City’, by which name Missolonghi is still officially known today.
The months that followed were the darkest time for the Revolution. In Nafplio, Hydra and Spetses it seemed as though all was lost. Sooner or later, Ibrahim’s forces were bound to return. Nafplio had much better defences than Missolonghi. But there could be no defence against starvation. Hydra and Spetses lived in daily expectation of a swoop by the Egyptian fleet, in a repetition of the wholesale destruction of their comrades-in-arms in Psara, where the entire community of the island had been wiped out in the summer of 1824. It is said that some of the leading citizens even contemplated flight to the British-ruled Ionian islands. For a few weeks, the whole population of Spetses, the smaller of the two communities, was evacuated to Hydra.
For more than a year after the loss of Missolonghi, things went from bad to worse. Repeated attempts to relieve the siege of Athens resulted in costly failures. Not even the arrival of high-profile foreign volunteers and an injection of money and ships from abroad could halt what seemed to be an inexorable slide in Greek military fortunes. Another outsider recruited in the desperation of the times was Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, the aristocrat from Corfu who for six years until his dismissal in 1822 had served as joint foreign minister of Russia. On 14 April 1827 a rancorous, third National Assembly, held at Damala (Troezen) in the northeastern Peloponnese, voted to offer the highest position of authority in the government to Kapodistrias. This was precisely the result that the Friendly Society had tried and failed to achieve almost a decade earlier. This time, perhaps surprisingly, in view of the situation in Greece, Kapodistrias accepted – though not immediately, and in the event he would not arrive for almost a year. The interim government, elected to serve in the meantime, had no grip on events. Lawlessness and starvation were everywhere; piracy flourished.
Two things combined to save the Revolution at this point. Neither could have been effective without the other. One was the dogged determination of a sufficient number of Greeks and their leaders to fight on. No doubt this resolution was fuelled by the refusal of the Ottomans to make concessions or grant terms to the insurgents – except in Roumeli where local arrangements applied and as a result the Revolution had already collapsed. The other was the success of Mavrokordatos, Kolettis, former Phanariots and men of education, merchants, shipowners and many others, in broadening the bounds of the conflict beyond their own shores. It was the international dimension that would make possible the decisive outcome of the Revolution – and also deepen the fault line that would be part of its legacy for the future.
THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION
From the very beginning, the Greek Revolution had never been a purely local affair, for Greeks alone. The Friendly Society had sought, and its leader had promised, military support from Russia. More unexpected, perhaps, was the ‘Manifesto addressed to Europe by Petros Mavromikhalis’ on 9 April 1821, just a week after his Maniat tribesmen had seized control of the town of Kalamata. Styling himself ‘Commander-in-Chief of the Spartan Troops’, Petrobey (as he is better known to history) called for ‘the aid of all the civilized nations of Europe’. ‘Greece, our mother,’ he continued, ‘was the lamp that illuminated you.’ This is the language of indebtedness that goes back to the European travellers of the previous century. The time for repayment has come: ‘Arms, money, and counsel, are what she expects from you.’10 The language of the French Revolution had taken root in this remote outpost of Europe, six years after the final defeat of Napoleon.
Events were to prove that Petrobey was no great internationalist in practice. The manifesto was just as much of an imaginative creation as the Provisional Constitution of Epidaurus a few months later. But, remarkably, both were heeded. The Constitution would soon find its way to London and into the hands of the veteran political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who returned it to the Greek government with a generous and thoughtful commentary. Bentham of course had no idea of the realities of the Revolution, or he might have saved himself the effort. But the point is that the great man even thought the document worthy of his attention. In the same way, and perhaps even more surprisingly, Petrobey’s call for international aid also brought a response.
From all over Europe, and even as far as away as the United States of America, volunteers began arriving in Greece. Some of them we have met already. They included two of the earliest and best historians of the Revolution, Thomas Gordon and George Finlay, both of them Scots, as well as the more famous Byron (‘half a Scot, by birth – and bred / A whole one’).11 The graves of many more are marked by a polyglot collection of memorials in the Garden of Heroes at Missolonghi, still a beautiful and tranquil spot where the aura of history lies heavily. British adventurers Richard Church and Thomas Lord Cochrane were entrusted with high commands, the one on land, the other at sea. So was the French veteran of Napoleon’s campaigns Charles Fabvier. Probably the most effective military contribution was made by Frank Abney Hastings. Dismissed from the Royal Navy for insubordination, Hastings would prove himself an ingenious naval strategist and went on to captain the world’s first fighting steamship, the Karteria, until his death in 1828 in an attempt to recapture Missolonghi.
The philhellenes, as these volunteers have come to be known, were not mercenary fighters. Nor were they in Greece to serve their own countries. Indeed, particularly in the first years, they had often to evade the efforts of the security services at home, who did their best to prevent them from going. In most countries the authorities greatly feared the spread of the ‘radicalization’, as we would call it today, that they associated with any revolutionary movement. The philhellenes were never very numerous. The total number lies probably between one thousand and twelve hundred.
Some historians have suggested that modern ‘humanitarian intervention’ began with the philhellenes in Greece in the 1820s. But this is to misunderstand the motives of these volunteers. No less than those who a century later would volunteer to fight in Spain, the philhellenes were prepared to risk their lives in somebody else’s war because they believed that they, too, had a stake in the conflict. In the language of the anonymous translator of Guys’ travel book, of Petrobey Mavromichalis, and the poet Shelley, these philhellenes were moved to repay a debt that they felt they owed to the origin of their own civilization. This is what Shelley meant when he wrote, memorably, a few months after the outbreak of the Revolution in Greece, ‘We are all Greeks.’ The Ottomans stood in the way of an emerging new Europe, built on classical foundations, that the philhellenes saw as their own. This was the call to which the volunteers were responding.
This is not to suggest that the philhellenes were indifferent to the human suffering that some of them witnessed at first hand and many more read about in the safety of their own homes. The Swiss and the Americans stand out in this respect. The Swiss banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard organized large-scale relief of famine in Greece during the winter after the fall of Missolonghi. Among the Americans, the energetic and humane Samuel Gridley Howe established a hospital on the island of Poros in 1827. Later, putting practical solutions ahead of veneration for the classical past, he would mastermind the demolition of the ruins of the ancient temple on the headland outside the port town on the island of Aegina, then the nation’s capital, in order to provide a working harbour and employment for thousands of displaced workers who might otherwise have starved.
The direct effect of the philhellenes on the conflict was limited. They won no decisive battles. Almost a third of those who volunteered lost their lives, either in combat or from disease. But the very fact that they were there at all was the foot in the door that would lead to much wider and more effective international involvement.
It was not just boots on the ground that the philhellenes brought. Many more than volunteered in person fought a vigorous propaganda war in Europe and the United States, in those early days when the power of the press to influence public opinion was beginning to make itself felt. Philhellenic committees raised money to pay for three steamships, a huge frigate built in America and, for several months after the fall of Missolonghi, the first Greek regular army. Loans for the Provisional Government were raised from private speculators on the London stockmarket in 1824 and 1825. All of these initiatives were mired in scandal – in the countries where the funds were raised, not just in Greece – and the scale of waste was shocking. Even so, they undoubtedly helped keep the Revolution alive during its darkest years.
But there was a limit to what individuals and even the power of private capital could do. If the philhellenes were the foot in the door, the door had still to be prised fully open. It was Mavrokordatos, more than anyone, who saw what had to be done. And doggedly, peering through his thick-lensed spectacles and sporting his incongruous frock coat, Mavrokordatos worked to bring the European powers on board.
At first it seemed hopeless. When the ‘Concert of Europe’ held its fifth – and as it turned out final – congress, at Verona in the autumn of 1822, the Provisional Government of Greece tried to send a delegation. But the Greeks were refused a hearing before they even arrived. Despite this, and unknown to the insurgents, a chink in the unity of the concerted powers was opening up at the Congress of Verona – which is why it would prove to be the last of its kind. The bone of contention was Spain, not Greece. But this was when Great Britain began to mark out a policy of non-intervention, and so to distance itself from the rest of the ‘Concert’. One of the last acts of the ultra-conservative British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, before he cut his throat in August 1822, had been to brief the Duke of Wellington, Britain’s representative at Verona and no friend to the Greek cause either, that it might be necessary to recognize Greek ships on the high seas as belligerents. In March the next year this small step-change was announced by Castlereagh’s successor as Foreign Secretary, George Canning. Although a Tory, Canning was of a very different stamp from his predecessor. A skilled orator, he commanded the respect of many in the opposition Whig party, not least among them Byron. Canning would go on to play a key role in the widening of the Greek conflict, during his tenure as Foreign Secretary, then briefly as prime minister until his death in August 1827, just two months short of the ultimate triumph for his Greek policy.
Recognizing the rights of belligerents on the high seas may not sound like much. It fell far short of formal recognition for Greece as an independent state. Great Britain was still neutral in the conflict. Nominally, at least, neutrality continued to be enforced in the British protectorate of the Ionian islands. But it meant that, legally, Greeks bearing arms were no longer to be regarded as pirates or criminals by the world’s largest navy. This was recognition, of sorts. It conferred a degree of legitimacy on Greek actions.
Once the change in British policy was known, Mavrokordatos moved swiftly. In a series of letters written and despatched in June and July 1823, addressed to Canning and other highly placed British officials, he set out his vision for an alliance between a newly independent Greece and Great Britain. It was to be based on common maritime and trading interests. But Mavrokordatos went further. Like most Greeks up to this time, he had envisaged foreign support for the Revolution coming from Russia. Now Mavrokordatos realized that competition between that country and its European rivals would be the key. The Greeks held in their hands the solution to the notoriously insoluble ‘Eastern Question’. A free and independent ally of Great Britain in the eastern Mediterranean would be the best guarantee of the balance of power in Europe, and put a limit to the expansion of Russia while the Ottoman Empire inevitably declined.
Mavrokordatos’s first moves were made in secret. There were many in Greece at this time who would have been horrified by these proposals. Many others distrusted their author as an outsider, as a devious manipulator, and out for his own gain. (Only the last of these charges, the one that carried the most weight at the time, can safely be discounted from the perspective of history.) It was the rumour of these manoeuvres that provoked Kolokotronis to block Mavrokordatos’s appointment as President of the Legislative Corps shortly afterwards, with the threat of violence. Canning, in any case, did not reply.
For the time being, Mavrokordatos had to be content with pushing forward the first application for a large foreign loan, not coincidentally to be raised in London. This move, unlike his previous one, had the full backing of the second National Assembly that had convened a few months before. Even Kolokotronis had voted for it at the time – although presciently the ‘Old Man of the Morea’ would confide his misgivings to Byron’s emissaries who visited him not long afterwards, objecting that:
Great Britain might thereby obtain an undue preponderance in Greece, which country he wished to be entirely unfettered, and that it might tend to aid the intrigues of Mavrocordato and the Phanariots, who … would contrive to appropriate to themselves the lion’s share of it.12
Internationalization was always going to have its downside.
A year later, in August 1824, the first civil war had been won by the modernizers. The way was clear for a renewed approach to the British Foreign Secretary. This time it was done quite openly, in the name of the Greek government. By now the chink in the unity of the ‘Concert of Europe’ had widened still further. The contents of a secret Russian memorandum had just been leaked. The Russian initiative would have taken the steam out of the Revolution by dividing its gains into separate ‘zones of influence’ for the European powers, each zone to be still nominally subject to the Sultan. In this way the appearance of maintaining the status quo could just about be kept up. The newly empowered Greek government was quick to exploit the opportunity. Its letter to Canning took the form of a bitter denunciation of the Russian initiative and a request to the British for assistance. This time the Foreign Secretary did reply, although still without commitment. Mavrokordatos’s policy of playing on the mutual mistrust between Russia and the Western powers was beginning to work.
By the time the arrival of Ibrahim and his Egyptian troops in the Peloponnese forced the issue, and with the ascendancy of the modernizers strengthened by their success in the second civil war, most of the Greek leaders had come round to the idea of trying to bring in one or more of the European powers. The question was, which one? So vital was this question that the very first signs of something like modern political parties beginning to emerge in independent Greece took the form of rival groups pushing for adherence to Great Britain (always, in Greek, called ‘England’), France or Russia. Although they were never formally acknowledged under these names, for the next twenty years there would be an ‘English’ party led by Mavrokordatos, a ‘French’ led by Kolettis and a ‘Russian’ initiated by Kolokotronis. Few were as astute as Mavrokordatos, who saw that the answer lay not with any one of the three, but in playing off the interests of each against the others. This may explain why Mavrokordatos’s strategy would soon be vindicated, even while his own political position within the government was eclipsed.
As the year 1825 progressed, with Ibrahim’s troops closing in on Nafplio and Missolonghi, and with Athens under siege, competition among the rival parties reached fever pitch. One group was negotiating in secret with France to offer the throne of Greece to the French Duke of Nemours. Kolokotronis addressed a formal act of submission to Russia, which fell on deaf ears. A rare moment of agreement in July brought all the leaders together to sign a document that would shortly be carried to London. Dated 1 August 1825, this declared that ‘the Greek nation places the sacred deposit of its liberty, independence, and political existence, under the absolute protection of Great Britain’.13 Even though none of the three powers addressed in 1825 was yet ready to recognize any rights at all for the Greek insurgents, still less to intervene, the Revolution was entering upon an entirely new phase.
Instead of responding directly, the British Foreign Secretary despatched his cousin, Sir Stratford Canning, as ambassador to Constantinople. The ambassador was instructed to travel by way of the Ionian islands and Greece. While there, he was to confer with the Greek Provisional Government. On a deserted shore of the Peloponnese opposite Hydra, he met Mavrokordatos on 9 January 1826. Immediately afterwards the ships carrying both men were caught in a sudden storm. The ambassador’s ship lost all its canvas and Mavrokordatos had to swim for his life when his foundered.14 Still, a basis for international involvement had for the first time been set out. It involved a concession for which Mavrokordatos would not be easily forgiven once it became known at home. On the one hand ‘Greece’ (of unspecified extent) was to be emptied of ‘Turks’ (meaning Muslims). On the other, it must pay an annual tribute to the Sultan and remain part of the Ottoman Empire. This was not the complete independence that the Greeks had been fighting for. But for the next four years it would remain all that was on the diplomatic table. Mavrokordatos was diplomat enough to know how to be patient.
Back in London, the Foreign Secretary had waited until he heard the result of this meeting. Now, under the pretext of conveying congratulations to the new Tsar, Nicholas I, who had succeeded Alexander the previous December, Canning despatched the Duke of Wellington to Russia to agree a bilateral deal, based on these terms. On 4 April 1826, while the siege of Missolonghi was entering its final weeks, a protocol was signed in St Petersburg. The governments of both Russia and Great Britain undertook to mediate with the Sultan to achieve the settlement that Mavrokordatos had agreed to, on behalf of the Greek government.
In the meantime, the Ottoman position had hardened still further. Already, in 1824, the high-profile involvement of Byron and the raising of the first foreign loan for Greece in London had provoked strong protests from Constantinople. Top-down in its thinking as it was, the Ottoman government could recognize a reality that its European counterparts were at first reluctant to acknowledge. Even if these were the acts of individuals without official sanction, what kind of ‘neutrality’ was this? It was worse when the Russian proposals for partition became known in May that year. From this time on, even those voices within the Ottoman system that had advocated winning back the Greek insurgents by more lenient means were silenced.15 It was the other side of the Greeks’ own battle cry, ‘Freedom or death’. Nothing less than total submission, annihilation if necessary, would do.
And even on the diplomatic front, for a time during the winter of 1826 and the first half of 1827 it looked as though it might have to be death. Indeed, its was the very starkness of this prospect, and the increasing likelihood of its happening, that gave a spur to the next round of diplomacy. Rumours were circulating in European capitals that Ibrahim intended to depopulate the whole of the Peloponnese and resettle it with Muslims from North Africa – in effect to reverse the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that the Greeks had begun in 1821. True or not, these rumours resonated powerfully. The fate of Missolonghi had left a deep mark throughout the continent. Byron’s death there, two years before, had ensured ‘recognition’ for the name throughout the world. Athens, the very home of Western civilization, was under siege, and finally capitulated in May. Even hard-headed political leaders and their governments could no longer be indifferent to a vague sense that something of their own was being threatened – the more so in those countries where a pro-Greek press was free enough to express or mobilize public opinion.
This is not to say that there was anything like unanimity in favour of intervention. As early as January 1824, the US Congress had debated the issue, in response to strong public fervour for the Greek cause, and ruled out risking American lives by an early recognition of Greek independence. In France, where philhellenic sentiment reached a peak at this time, the government was secretly building warships for the Egyptian fleet and even sent French officers as advisers to accompany them when they went into service in 1827.16 In Great Britain the ruling Tory party, with the exception of Canning, was in general hostile to anything that smacked of revolution. This was the instinctive response of the Duke of Wellington, whose role in the outcome would therefore become somewhat ironic.
Despite these conflicting currents, the mood among the Great Powers was slowly shifting. The French government, too, had received appeals from Greece, and was piqued at being left out of the bilateral agreement drawn up in St Petersburg. Early in 1827 the French drew up their own draft of an international treaty. Finally, on 6 July, with Canning as prime minister, a tripartite treaty was signed in London by the representatives of Britain, France and Russia. The terms remained more or less as they had been before. There was some vagueness about how mediation was to be forced upon the warring parties, if the Sultan continued to rule out any foreign intervention in what the Ottomans considered to be their own internal affairs. Without too much attention being given to the precise wording of its mandate, the powers now dispatched a joint naval force to the Mediterranean to back up their words. It was a recipe for confrontation. And so it proved.
The battle that would decide the outcome of the Greek Revolution was fought in Navarino Bay on 20 October 1827. The British, French and Russian task force had only a third as many ships, but their firepower was far superior. The combined Egyptian and Ottoman fleet was all but destroyed at its anchorage. At least one whole book has been written about the engagement. At the time and ever since, there has been intense controversy about who fired the first shot, and over the precise responsibility of the commander-in-chief, the Royal Navy’s Admiral Edward Codrington. It was one of the very few set-piece battles in the whole of the Revolution. Navarino changed everything. And not a single Greek took part. That was the astonishing extent of the leverage that had been achieved by the determination of Mavrokordatos and others to internationalize their struggle.
From now on, the outcome of the Revolution would be indissolubly interwoven with the diplomacy and high politics of the European powers. But not of any one power. That, from the Greek point of view, was the beauty of it. Even while in Greece the rival parties came to blows over their preferred allegiances, the battle of Navarino had put in place a dynamic that could not be stopped, or resolved in favour of any one of the players. If the fate of the Revolution would now be decided far away from Greece, it would lie not in the hands of a single foreign country but in the interplay of each with its rivals. This was the true significance of the standing conference of the representatives of the three powers, known as the ‘London Greek Conference’, that first came together at the end of 1826 and would last right through to 1832. Between the summer of 1827 and the autumn of 1829 each of the three Great Powers in turn would take the lead in military operations to back up its diplomatic initiatives.
At Navarino, it was Great Britain that provided the largest squadron and the overall command. The consequence of that action was to remove all threat to Greece from the sea. A year later, in Britain, much of Canning’s policy was reversed by the new prime minister, the Duke of Wellington. It was probably at Wellington’s instigation that King George IV all but apologized to the Ottomans for the ‘untoward event’ at Navarino, in a speech to Parliament the following January. But the London conference was a kind of three-way seesaw. While British support for Greece flagged, that of France and Russia rose.
It was French troops, under General Nicolas Maison, who were entrusted with ejecting the last Ottoman forces from the Peloponnese in the summer of 1828. This was quite different from the intervention of the philhellenes, which still continued: General Maison was acting on direct orders from Paris. Then, from the spring of the same year until September 1829, Russia launched a new war against the Ottoman Empire. This was exactly what the Friendly Society had once conspired to bring about. But the circumstances were quite different now. It has been argued that Russia did more militarily than any other country to help the Greeks win their independence. And it is true that the Russian navy continued to be active in the Aegean, suppressing piracy.17 But all the fighting in this new Russo-Ottoman war took place in the Balkans and the far shore of the Black Sea, in the Caucasus. The fate of Greece was only incidental to this latest bout in a series of wars that went back more than a century.
When Tsar Nicholas’s forces reached Adrianople, today’s Edirne, less than a hundred miles from the Ottoman capital, in August 1829, the effect was electrifying. For several weeks it looked as though the Russians would advance all the way to Constantinople. It was the turn of that arch-conservative, and no friend to Greece, the Duke of Wellington, to take a hand. ‘We must reconstruct a Greek Empire,’ wrote the prime minister to his Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, on 11 September; ‘no Power of Europe ought to take anything for itself excepting the Emperor of Russia a sum for his expenses.’18 In the event, it did not come to that. The Sultan sued for peace and accepted some fairly humiliating terms in the Treaty of Adrianople, signed three days after the Iron Duke’s letter. They included accepting a deal for Greece along the lines that had been agreed between Sir Stratford Canning and Mavrokordatos at their meeting on that stormy day opposite Hydra, at the beginning of 1826. Greece would have self-government, but would remain a part of the Ottoman Empire, paying an annual tribute.
Even Wellington was now persuaded of the truth of what Mavrokordatos had first proposed to the British Foreign Secretary, back in 1823: the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs. Peace in Europe depended on finding a substitute to counterbalance the weight of Russia. Greece was the only option available. It was the British government, grudgingly, and motivated by distrust of its allies, that threw the final, unlooked-for ingredient into the mix. Why should not this new Greece be fully independent? That way, all three powers, as well as the Ottoman Empire, would be obliged to give up any pretension they may have had to rule Greece as their own dependency.
None dared object. The Sultan, for his part, was already bound by the terms of the Treaty of Adrianople, and so was obliged to accept whatever was determined. The Greeks were not asked either. The Protocol of London, signed on 3 February 1830, on behalf of the governments of Great Britain, France and Russia, declared for the first time, and under the guarantee of the three powers: ‘Greece will form an independent State, and will enjoy all those rights – political, administrative, and commercial – attached to complete independence.’19
FINAL PUSH
Events in Greece by this time had come to revolve almost entirely around the personality and actions of one man. Kapodistrias had been elected to supreme authority at a moment of collective panic, when the life of Greece hung by a thread. The Third National Assembly, in 1827, had devised for him a title that had never been used in Greek before and never would be again. Kyvernitis in Greek is the exact equivalent of the Latin gubernator, from which the word ‘governor’ is derived. Originally meaning ‘helmsman’, kyvernitis today is used exclusively for the captain of a ship or an aircraft. Most accounts in English give Kapodistrias the title of ‘President’, but the Greek equivalent was already in use, under the provisional constitutions of the 1820s, for other roles at the top of government. The election of Kapodistrias was from the beginning an interim solution, an emergency measure that was not to last for more than a maximum of seven years. In Greek, Kapodistrias was never ‘President’ of Greece. He was its Governor, pending the final outcome of the Revolution.
It was never clear to whom Kapodistrias was answerable. Was it to the Great Powers that had acquiesced in his appointment? Or to the Greek people? Or to the Greek Provisional Constitution under which he had been elected, and which he then proceeded to abrogate? As a native of Corfu, born under Venetian rule, and an aristocrat, Kapodistrias was at once an insider and outsider. He was a product of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. But he had spent most of his adult life and gained his political experience abroad, first in Russia and latterly in exile in Switzerland. It was this, above all, that gave him authority in the eyes of those who had elected him. Nothing in Kapodistrias’s upbringing or his manners could have prepared him to fit into the world of the Peloponnese in the late 1820s. It was not his way, in any case, to fit in.
There is something enigmatic about Kapodistrias the man. The same can be said, even with the benefit of almost two centuries of hindsight, about the nature of his rule. An authoritarian, lonely, austere figure, he was seen by some (and is still) as the saviour of his country who brought order out of chaos. Support for this view can be found in the fact that his three and a half years in power were book-ended by periods of violent anarchy. These had nothing of the character or excuse of the civil wars of 1824, in which real and inescapable tensions over the nature and purpose of the Revolution were being played out. The Peloponnese before Kapodistrias arrived in January 1828 had descended into armed chaos. When he sailed into Nafplio, escorted by warships belonging to each of the Great Powers, it was to find rival militias bombarding each other and the town from the two great fortresses that overlook it. This perhaps helps to explain why Kapodistrias never lost the devotion of a large section of the populace – and, in turn, he seems to have entertained a slightly romantic, certainly paternalistic affection for them. For most of the years that he ruled, the Governor was the nearest thing that existed to a guarantee of order. On the other hand, his distrust of the Greek leaders, even those who remained loyal to him, would be the cause of his downfall.
It was during Kapodistrias’s rule that the last battles took place on the external front. These were an anticlimax. In the Peloponnese the business of mopping up the last Ottoman forces that had landed with Ibrahim in 1825 was in the capable hands of General Maison and his regular French force. In Roumeli, strenuous efforts were made during the first months of 1828 to regain a foothold, to retake Missolonghi and re-establish a Greek presence further north. The British philhellenes Frank Hastings and Richard Church played a large part in these operations, in one of which Hastings lost his life. But once Russia had declared war on the Ottoman Empire at the end of April, the formidable Reshid Pasha, who had subdued Missolonghi and Athens, was redeployed with all available troops to the Balkans. With the departure of Reshid, it was open season for the Greek- and Albanian-speaking militias, the latter part-Christian, part-Muslim, to fight it out or form new alliances as they saw fit.
The last battle of the war took place in September 1829 on the pass between Thebes and Livadia. It was not much more than a skirmish. Honours went to Dimitrios Ypsilantis, the brother of Alexandros who had begun the Revolution eight and a half years before. But now it made no difference. Thanks to the terms dictated by the Russians to the Ottomans at the Treaty of Adrianople that same month, the extent of territory that would become part of the Greek state north of the Isthmus would be determined not by military operations but by lines drawn on a map in a far-away part of Europe.
Kapodistrias’s most important task was to carry forward the diplomatic campaign that Mavrokordatos had initiated in 1823. And even here, despite determination and persistence, his freedom for action would prove limited. The London conference had acquired the habit of reaching decisions without consulting the Greeks. Trained diplomat that he was, Kapodistrias should have been well placed to win maximum advantage for his country. But his very advantage turned out to be a handicap. The Governor had acquired his diplomatic skills in the Russian service. The British and the French could never be persuaded that he was negotiating sincerely on behalf of Greece, rather than as a secret arm of the Russian interest. Sadly, Tsar Nicholas seems not to have trusted him either, although he had granted him an honourable discharge from his service in order to take up his position in Greece. For all his efforts on the diplomatic front, it is hard to point to any element of the final settlement that was due to the initiative of Kapodistrias himself.
It was his actions at home that made the most impact. Critics, such as George Finlay, accused Kapodistrias of being a tyrant and motivated by selfish ambition.20 On the positive side, he promoted education and encouraged the founding of new schools using the latest experimental methods from Britain and continental Europe. He introduced Greece’s first modern currency, based on a coin called the phoenix, and an embryonic national bank. He organized the judiciary. He began work on a much-needed land registry – which remains much-needed and incomplete at the time of writing, almost two centuries later. He also introduced that staple of every Greek taverna and restaurant in later times, the potato.
All accounts agree that Kapodistrias tended politically towards the sort of autocracy that he had been used to in Russia. To that extent, his whole Governorship ran counter to the democratic and pluralist tenor that had been emerging throughout the Revolution. His politics could not have been more different from those of the Friendly Society, which had once tried to recruit him as its leader. Under Kapodistrias, Greece moved backwards politically. He has been called an ‘enlightened despot’, and this seems not far from the mark.21 Although only in his early fifties, Kapodistrias was already an anachronism in independent Greece. Perhaps the most lasting legacy of his rule has been as a role model for authoritarianism that could be emulated by would-be ‘saviours’ of their country in the future.
By the start of 1831, Kapodistrias was attempting to face down two separate rebellions from opposite sides. On one side were the shipowners and merchants of Hydra, on the other the proud warriors of Mani, led by the Mavromichalis family. The nub for both groups was taxation. The central government looked to the wealthiest of its subjects to provide essential funds for its own operations. The Maniats, in particular, had never paid any taxes to the Ottomans, and refused to do so now to the agents of Kapodistrias. The shipowners of the islands had had arrangements of their own, before the Revolution, that had worked well for them. Now they too were threatened with impositions that they had never had to pay before. Far from subsidizing a common treasury, these and just about every other interest group in the land looked to the government as a source of further wealth to be milked. They had a case, too – since these were the people whose livelihoods had borne the brunt of a decade of war. The devastation of ten years had impoverished everyone, the central treasury included. The rebellions against Kapodistrias were in essence tax revolts.
But they were not only about money. Mavrokordatos, who had always been close to the entrepreneurial middle class of the islands, by this time had emerged as the leader of political opposition to the Governor. Kapodistrias’s refusal to reinstate the Provisional Constitution under which he had been elected was a step too far for Mavrokordatos. Suspicion that the Governor was prepared to allow a free hand to Russia contributed as well. Matters came to a head when the Hydriot Admiral Miaoulis defied the government. His ships were cornered in the harbour of Poros by a Russian squadron. Rather than submit, Miaoulis blew up the flagship of the Greek fleet, the Hellas, which had been built at great cost with money raised by American philhellenes. It was an absurd waste.
By the end of the summer, both rebellions had been quashed. But Kapodistrias’s victory was not to last. Petrobey Mavromichalis and two of his relatives were still being held by the government in Nafplio, effectively as hostages, in October. Petrobey was the head of his clan and the undisputed leader of the Maniats. It seems that he had not been directly involved in the tax revolt. It is not clear whether his brother Konstantinos and his son Georgios had been either. But Petrobey was in prison, with the other two under a loose form of arrest, being allowed to move freely only within the walls of the town, and each of them always accompanied by an armed guard.
Early on the morning of Sunday 9 October 1831, as Kapodistrias was about to enter the church of St Spyridon in a backstreet of Nafplio, Konstantinos and Georgios were waiting for him on either side of the door, armed. Both were under guard, but evidently not restrained. There was something almost stage-managed about what happened next. The Governor saw them, hesitated, then went forward, almost as though willingly, to his death. He fell on the spot. The hole allegedly gouged by one of the bullets fired at him is today pointed out to tourists in the doorway of the church. One of the assassins was lynched on the spot – further proof that although he had alienated the leaders, Kapodistrias still commanded the loyalty of many people on the street. The other assassin was caught and after due process executed.
More than a century later, writing at another turning point in Greek history, in 1944, the poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis would recreate these events for the stage and represent Kapodistrias’s death as a Christ-like act of sacrifice for the sake of his divided nation. At the time, reactions by those whose politics could loosely be termed liberal and progressive were intemperate. The assassins were hailed in some quarters as the heirs of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the tyrant-slayers of classical Athens. The octogenarian Korais, he who had been the first to articulate the idea of Greece as a modern nation, unforgivingly complained in print that the murderers had saved ‘the transgressor against Hellenic laws from a punishment more just than death: expulsion in disgrace from Hellas’.22
Once it was known that the Governor had been assassinated, anarchy returned to the Peloponnese with a vengeance.
For more than a year after that, the political life of independent Greece fragmented. No group or leader could afford to recognize or allow any other to become dominant. It was like a violent caricature of the rivalry among the Great Powers, which the most far-sighted of the revolutionaries had been so successful in exploiting. The last of a series of National Assemblies ended in ignominy in August 1832, when armed soldiers ‘burst into the hall of the assembly … and carried off the president and several deputies, as hostages for the payment of their arrears’.23 The ill-fated gathering took place in a shanty-town on the fringe of Nafplio, which had been founded by Kapodistrias to house refugees from the fighting elsewhere in Greece. Its name, Pronoia, means ‘Providence’. Kapodistrias had been a great believer in Divine Providence. Whether any of those present on that August day was alert to the irony is not recorded.
The Revolution ended as it had begun, with the near-total collapse of civil order. This time the violence was not between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks, but among fellow Greeks and fellow Christians. True, it was on nothing like so horrific a scale. But lives were still being lost, and many more livelihoods went with them. The very last hostilities took place in the town of Argos, not far from the capital, Nafplio, on 16 January 1833, only days before the arrival of the country’s new king, with an army of Germans to restore order.
It had taken some time for the three Great Powers to follow through after the London Protocol of 1830. Upheavals in France, Belgium and Poland, and a change of government in Great Britain, had already drawn attention away from Greece, before the assassination of Kapodistrias. But it was once again in Europe’s northern capitals that the fate of the new nation would be decided. And it is at least possible that recognition of this fact was one of the causes for the mayhem on the ground.
It was not until early in 1832 that the reconvened London conference agreed to offer the throne of Greece to Otto, the underage second son of King Ludwig of Bavaria. The previous favourite for the role, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, had turned it down after prolonged deliberation. Leopold would earn his place in history as the first King of the Belgians instead. All parties professed themselves satisfied with Otto’s appointment. The Greeks, once again, had not been consulted – but by this time no individual or group within Greece had the authority to represent the country anyway. Otto, like the barbarians of Cavafy’s famous poem of the next century, could be seen as ‘some sort of a solution’.
A new protocol, signed by the Great Powers in London in May 1832, updated the terms of the settlement that had first been set out in 1830. Otto would become king when he reached the age of majority in 1835. A Bavarian regency would hold power until then. This time the frontiers of the new state were more generously drawn than they had been at first, though they would still leave three times as many Orthodox Greek speakers outside it as lived within it. The northern frontier was to run from just south of Volos in the east to just south of Arta in the west. It was also finally determined which islands were to be incorporated into the new state. Those nearest to the mainland on the Aegean side, as far north as the Sporades, were in; Crete, Samos and Chios, larger islands that had all played a part in the Revolution, were excluded. For the first time in the 3,500-year recorded history of the Greek language, Greece existed as a political entity on the map of Europe.
With the arrival of Otto, aboard a British warship, at Nafplio on 6 February 1833, the new birth had been delivered. Nobody’s brainchild, an unplanned offspring, it was unavoidably the child of its two parents, Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But like any human child, it was also a new entity, which was bound to grow up to define its own unique, unforeseeable personality.