Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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Canning is invested with a spurious glory when it is said that his action
in Spain and in Portugal broke up the league of the Continental Courts.
Canning indeed shaped the policy of our own country with equal independence
and wisdom, but the political centre of Europe was at this time not London
but Vienna. The keystone of the European fabric was the union of Austria
and Russia, and this union was endangered, not by anything that could take
place in the Spanish Peninsula, but by the conflicting interests of these
two great States in regard to the Ottoman Empire. From the moment when the
Treaty of Paris was signed, every Austrian politician fixed his gaze upon
the roads leading to the Lower Danube, and anxiously noted the signs of
coming war, or of continued peace, between Russia and the Porte. [348] It
was the triumph of Metternich to have diverted the Czar's thoughts during
the succeeding years from his grievances against Turkey, and to have
baffled the Russian diplomatists and generals who, like Capodistrias,
sought to spur on their master to enterprises of Eastern conquest. At the
Congress of Verona the shifting and incoherent manoeuvres of Austrian
statecraft can indeed only be understood on the supposition that Metternich
was thinking all the time less of Spain than of Turkey, and struggling at
whatever cost to maintain that personal influence over Alexander which had
hitherto prevented the outbreak of war in the East. But the antagonism so
long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection
brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most
embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the
ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went
to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he
did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his
intervention, would probably have made an end of the despotic amities of
1815. It is not necessary to the title of a great statesman that he should
have called into being the elements which make a new political order
possible; it is sufficient praise that he should have known how to turn
them to account.




CHAPTER XV.


Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions--The Greek Church--Communal
System--The AEgaean Islands--The Phanariots--Greek Intellectual Revival;
Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the
French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetaeria Philike--Hypsilanti's Attempt
in the Danubian Provinces; its Failure--Revolt of the Morea: Massacres:
Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople--Attitude of
Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at
Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Massacre of Chios--
Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the
Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and
invades the Morea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philhellenism in Europe--Russian
Proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander:
Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg--
Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death
of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and
1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold
accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho,
King of Greece.


[Greece in the Napoleonic age.]

Of the Christian races which at the beginning of the third decade of this
century peopled the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek was
that which had been least visibly affected by the political and military
events of the Napoleonic age. Servia, after a long struggle, had in the
year 1817 gained local autonomy under its own princes, although Turkish
troops still garrisoned its fortresses, and the sovereignty of the Sultan
was acknowledged by the payment of tribute. The Romanic districts,
Wallachia and Moldavia, which, in the famous interview of Tilsit, Napoleon
had bidden the Czar to make his own, were restored by Russia to the Porte
in the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, but under conditions which virtually
established a Russian protectorate. Greece, with the exception of the
Ionian Islands, had neither been the scene of any military operations, nor
formed the subject of any treaty. Yet the age of the French Revolution and
of the Napoleonic wars had silently wrought in the Greek nation the last of
a great series of changes which fitted it to take its place among the free
peoples of Europe. The signs were there from which those who could read the
future might have gathered that the political resurrection of Greece was
near at hand. There were some who, with equal insight and patriotism,
sought during this period to lay the intellectual foundation for that
national independence which they foresaw that their children would win with
the sword.

[Greece in the eighteenth century.]

The forward movement of the Greek nation may be said, in general terms, to
have become visible during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Serfage had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a
farmer paying a rent in kind for his land. In the gradual and unobserved
emancipation of the labouring class the first condition of national revival
had already been fulfilled. The peasantry had been formed which, when the
conflict with the Turk broke out, bore the brunt of the long struggle. In
comparison with the Prussian serf, the Greek cultivator at the beginning of
the eighteenth century was an independent man: in comparison with the
English labourer, he was well fed and well housed. The evils to which the
Greek population was exposed, wherever Greeks and Turks lived together,
were those which brutalised or degraded the Christian races in every
Ottoman province. There was no redress for injury inflicted by a Mohammedan
official or neighbour. If a wealthy Turk murdered a Greek in the fields,
burnt down his house, and outraged his family, there was no court where the
offender could be brought to justice. The term by which the Turk described
his Christian neighbour was "our rayah," that is, "our subject." A
Mohammedan landowner might terrorise the entire population around him,
carry off the women, flog and imprison the men, and yet feel that he had
committed no offence against the law; for no law existed but the Koran, and
no Turkish court of justice but that of the Kadi, where the complaint of
the Christian passed for nothing.

This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the
subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman
Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The
second great and general evil was the extortion practised by the
tax-gatherers, and this fell upon the poorer Mohammedans equally with the
Christians, except in regard to the poll-tax, or haratsch, the badge of
servitude, which was levied on Christians alone. All land paid tithe to the
State; and until the tax-gatherer had paid his visit it was not permitted
to the peasant to cut the ripe crop. This rule enabled the tax-gatherer,
whether a Mohammedan or a Christian, to inflict ruin upon those who did not
bribe himself or his masters; for by merely postponing his visit he could
destroy the value of the harvest. Round this central institution of tyranny
and waste, there gathered, except in the districts protected by municipal
privileges, every form of corruption natural to a society where the State
heard no appeals, and made no inquiry into the processes employed by those
to whom it sold the taxes. What was possible in the way of extortion was
best seen in the phenomenon of well-built villages being left tenantless,
and the population of rich districts dying out in a time of peace, without
pestilence, without insurrection, without any greater wrong on the part of
the Sultan's government than that normal indifference which permitted the
existence of a community to depend upon the moderation or the caprice of
the individual possessors of force.

[Origin of modern Greece Byzantine, not classic.]

[Slavonic and Albanian elements.]

Such was the framework, or, as it may be said, the common-law of the mixed
Turkish and Christian society of the Ottoman Empire. On this background we
have now to trace the social and political features which stood out in
Greek life, which preserved the race from losing its separate nationality,
and which made the ultimate recovery of its independence possible. In the
first outburst of sympathy and delight with which every generous heart in
western Europe hailed the standard of Hellenic freedom upraised in 1821,
the twenty centuries which separated the Greece of literature from the
Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight
back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman
who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who
gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of
poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a
brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to
gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave
inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of the
Greeks; and it produced a false impression of the causes which had led up
to the war of independence, and of the qualities, the habits, the bonds of
union, which exercised the greatest power over the nation. These were, to a
great extent, unlike anything existing in the ancient world; they had
originated in Byzantine, not in classic Greece; and where the scenes of old
Hellenic history appeared to be repeating themselves, it was due more to
the continuing influence of the same seas and the same mountains than to
the survival of any political fragments of the past. The Greek population
had received a strong Slavonic infusion many centuries before. More
recently, Albanian settlers had expelled the inhabitants from certain
districts both in the mainland and in the Morea. Attica, Boeotia, Corinth,
and Argolis were at the outbreak of the war of independence peopled in the
main by a race of Albanian descent, who still used, along with some Greek,
the Albanian language. [349] The sense of a separate nationality was,
however, weak among these settlers, who, unlike some small Albanian
communities in the west of the Morea, were Christians, not Mohammedans.
Neighbourhood, commerce, identity of religion and similarity of local
institutions were turning these Albanians into Greeks; and no community of
pure Hellenic descent played a greater part in the national war, or
exhibited more of the maritime energy and daring which we associate
peculiarly with the Hellenic name, than the islanders of Hydra and Spetza,
who had crossed from the Albanian parts of the Morea and taken possession
of these desert rocks not a hundred years before. The same phenomenon of an
assimilation of Greeks and Albanians was seen in southern Epirus, the
border-ground between the two races. The Suliotes, Albanian mountaineers,
whose military exploits form one of the most extraordinary chapters in
history, showed signs of Greek influences before the Greek war of
independence began, and in this war they made no distinction between the
Greek cause and their own. Even the rule of the ferocious Ali Pasha at
Janina had been favourable to the extension of Greek civilisation in
Epirus. Under this Mohammedan tyrant Janina contained more schools than
Athens. The Greek population of the district increased; and in the sense of
a common religious antagonism to the Mohammedan, the Greek and the Albanian
Christians in Epirus forgot their difference of race.

[The Greek Church.]

[Lower clergy.]

[The Patriarch an imperial functionary.]

[The Bishops civil magistrates.]

The central element in modern Greek life was the religious profession of
the Orthodox Eastern Church. Where, as in parts of Crete, the Greek adopted
Mohammedanism, all the other elements of his nationality together did not
prevent him from amalgamating with the Turk. The sound and popular forces
of the Church belonged to the lower clergy, who, unlike the priests of the
Roman Church, were married and shared the life of the people. If ignorant
and bigoted, they were nevertheless the real guardians of national spirit;
and if their creed was a superstition rather than a religion, it at least
kept the Greeks in a wholesome antagonism to the superstition of their
masters. The higher clergy stood in many respects in a different position.
The Patriarch of Constantinople was a great officer of the Porte. His
dignities and his civil jurisdiction had been restored and even enlarged by
the Mohammedan conquerors of the Greek Empire, with the express object of
employing the Church as a means of securing obedience to themselves: and it
was quite in keeping with the history of this great office that, when the
Greek national insurrection at last broke out, the Patriarch Gregorius IV.
should have consented, though unwillingly, to launch the curse of the
Church against it. The Patriarch gained his office by purchase, or through
intrigues at the Divan; he paid an enormous annual backsheesh for it; and
he was liable to be murdered or deposed as soon as his Mussulman patrons
lost favour with the Sultan, or a higher bid was made for his office by a
rival ecclesiastic. To satisfy the claims of the Palace the Patriarch was
compelled to be an extortioner himself. The bishoprics in their turn were
sold in his ante-chambers, and the Bishops made up the purchase-money by
fleecing their clergy. But in spite of a deserved reputation for venality,
the Bishops in Greece exercised very great influence, both as ecclesiastics
and as civil magistrates. Whether their jurisdiction in lawsuits between
Christians arose from the custom of referring disputes to their arbitration
or was expressly granted to them by the Sultan, they virtually displaced in
all Greek communities the court of the Kadi, and afforded the merchant or
the farmer a tribunal where his own law was administered in his own
language. Even a Mohammedan in dispute with a Christian would sometimes
consent to bring the matter before the Bishops' Court rather than enforce
his right to obtain the dilatory and capricious decision of an Ottoman
judge.

[Communal organisation.]

[The Morea.]

The condition of the Greeks living in the country that now forms the
Hellenic Kingdom and in the AEgaean Islands exhibited strong local contrasts.
It was, however, common to all that, while the Turk held the powers of
State in his hand, the details of local administration in each district
were left to the inhabitants, the Turk caring nothing about these matters
so long as the due amount of taxes was paid and the due supply of sailors
provided. The apportionment of taxes among households and villages seems to
have been the germ of self-government from which several types of municipal
organisation, some of them of great importance in the history of the Greek
nation, developed. In the Paschalik of the Morea the taxes were usually
farmed by the Voivodes, or Beys, the Turkish governors of the twenty-three
provinces into which the Morea was divided. But in each village or township
the inhabitants elected officers called Proestoi, who, besides collecting
the taxes and managing the affairs of their own communities, met in a
district-assembly, and there determined what share of the district-taxation
each community should bear. One Greek officer, called Primate, and one
Mohammedan, called Ayan, were elected to represent the district, and to
take part in the council of the Pasha of the Morea, who resided at
Tripolitza. [350] The Primates exercised considerable power. Created
originally by the Porte to expedite the collection of the revenue, they
became a Greek aristocracy. They were indeed an aristocracy of no very
noble kind. Agents of a tyrannical master, they shared the vices of the
tyrant and of the slave. Often farmers of the taxes themselves, obsequious
and intriguing in the palace of the Pasha at Tripolitza, grasping and
despotic in their native districts, they were described as a species of
Christian Turk. But whatever their vices, they saved the Greeks from being
left without leaders. They formed a class accustomed to act in common,
conversant with details of administration, and especially with the
machinery for collecting and distributing supplies. It was this financial
experience of the Primates of the Morea which gave to the rebellion of the
Greeks what little unity of organisation it exhibited in its earliest
stage.

[Northern Greece. The Armatoli and the Klephts.]

On the north of the Gulf of Corinth the features of the communal system
were less distinct than in the Morea. There was, however, in the
mountain-country of AEtolia and Pindus a rough military organisation which
had done great service to Greece in keeping alive the national spirit and
habits of personal independence. The Turks had found a local militia
established in this wild region at the time of their conquest, and had not
interfered with it for some centuries. The Armatoli, or native soldiery,
recruited from peasants, shepherds, and muleteers, kept Mohammedan
influences at a distance, until, in the eighteenth century, the Sultans
made it a fixed rule of policy to diminish their numbers and to reduce the
power of their captains. Before 1820 the Armatoli had become comparatively
few and weak; but as they declined, bands of Klephts, or brigands, grew in
importance; and the mountaineer who was no longer allowed to practise arms
as a guardian of order, enlisted himself among the robbers. Like the
freebooters of our own northern border, these brigands became the heroes of
song. Though they plundered the Greek as well as the Mohammedan, the
national spirit approved their exploits. It was, no doubt, something, that
the physical energy of the marauder and the habit of encountering danger
should not be wholly on the side of the Turk and the Albanian. But the
influence of the Klephts in sustaining Greek nationality has been
overrated. They had but recently become numerous, and the earlier
organisation of the northern Armatoli was that to which the sound and
vigorous character of the Greek peasantry in these regions, the finest part
of the Greek race on the mainland, was really due. [351]

[The AEgaean Islands.]

[Chios.]

In the islands of the AEgaean the condition of the Greeks was on the whole
happy and prosperous. Some of these islands had no Turkish population; in
others the caprice of a Sultana, the goodwill of the Capitan Pasha who
governed the Archipelago, or the judicious offer of a sum of money when
money was wanted by the Porte, had so lightened the burden of Ottoman
sovereignty, that the Greek island-community possessed more liberty than
was to be found in any part of Europe, except Switzerland. The taxes
payable to the central government, including the haratsch or poll-tax
levied on all Christians, had often been commuted for a fixed sum, which
was raised without the interposition of the Turkish tax-gatherer. In Hydra,
Spetza, and Psara, the so-called nautical islands, the supremacy of the
Turk was felt only in the obligation to furnish sailors to the Ottoman
navy, and in the payment of a tribute of about L100 per annum. The
government of these three islands was entirely in the hands of the
inhabitants. In Chios, though a considerable Mussulman population existed
by the side of the Greek, there was every sign of peace and prosperity.
Each island bore its own peculiar social character, and had its municipal
institutions of more or less value. The Hydriote was quarrelsome,
turbulent, quick to use the knife, but outspoken, honest in dealing, and an
excellent sailor. The picture of Chian life, as drawn even by those who
have judged the Greeks most severely, is one of singular beauty and
interest; the picture of a self-governing society in which the family
trained the citizen in its own bosom, and in which, while commerce enriched
all, the industry of the poor within their homes and in their gardens was
refined by the practice of an art. The skill which gave its value to the
embroidery and to the dyes of Chios was exercised by those who also worked
the hand-loom and cultivated the mastic and the rose. The taste and the
labour of man requited nature's gifts of sky, soil, and sea; and in the
pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the
worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown. [352] How bright a
scene of industry, when compared with the grime and squalor of the English
factory-town, where the human and the inanimate machine grind out their
yearly mountains of iron-ware and calico, in order that the employer may
vie with his neighbours in soulless ostentation, and the workman consume
his millions upon millions in drink.

[The Greeks have ecclesiastical power in other Turkish provinces.]

The territory where the Greeks formed the great majority of the population
included, beyond the boundaries of the present Hellenic Kingdom, the
islands adjacent to the coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Chalcidic
peninsula in Macedonia. But the activity of the race was not confined
within these limits. If the Greek was a subject in his own country, he was
master in the lands of some of his neighbours. A Greek might exercise power
over other Christian subjects of the Porte either as an ecclesiastic, or as
the delegate of the Sultan in certain fixed branches of the administration.
The authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognised over the
whole of the European provinces of Turkey, except Servia. The Bishops in
all these provinces were Greeks; the services of the Church were conducted
in the Greek tongue; the revenues of the greater part of the Church-lands,
and the fees of all the ecclesiastical courts, went into Greek pockets. In
things religious, and in that wide range of civil affairs which in
communities belonging to the Eastern Church appertains to the higher
religious office, the Greeks had in fact regained the ascendancy which they
had possessed under the Byzantine Empire. The dream of the Churchman was
not the creation of an independent kingdom of Greece, but the restoration
of the Eastern Empire under Greek supremacy. When it was seen that the Slav
and the Rouman came to the Greek for law, for commercial training, for
religious teaching, and looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as the
ultimate judge of all disputes, it was natural that the belief should arise
that, when the Turk passed away, the Greek would step into his place. But
the influence of the Greeks, great as it appeared to be, did not in reality
reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be
foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of assimilation at
work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and
plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a
rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his
children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the
Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home. [353]
In Roumania, the only feeling towards the Greek intruder was one of intense
hatred.

[The Phanariot officials of the Porte.]

[Greek Hospodars.]

Four great offices of the Ottoman Empire were always held by Greeks. These
were the offices of Dragoman, [354] or Secretary, of the Porte, Dragoman of
the Fleet, and the governorships, called Hospodariates, of Wallachia and
Moldavia. The varied business of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the
administration of its revenues, the conduct of its law-courts, had drawn a
multitude of pushing and well-educated Greeks to the quarter of
Constantinople called the Phanar, in which the palace of the Patriarch is
situated. Merchants and professional men inhabited the same district. These
Greeks of the capital, the so-called Phanariots, gradually made their way
into the Ottoman administration as Turkish energy declined, and the
conquering race found that it could no longer dispense with the weapons of
calculation and diplomacy. The Treaty of Carlowitz, made in 1699, after the
unsuccessful war in which the Turks laid siege to Vienna, was negotiated on
behalf of the Porte by Alexander Maurokordatos, a Chian by birth, who had
become physician to the Sultan and was virtually the Foreign Minister of
Turkey. His sons, Nicholas and Constantine, were made Hospodars of
Wallachia and Moldavia early in the eighteenth century; and from this time
forward, until the outbreak of the Greek insurrection, the governorships of
the Roumanian provinces were entrusted to Phanariot families. The result
was that a troop of Greek adventurers passed to the north of the Danube,
and seized upon every office of profit in these unfortunate lands. There
were indeed individuals among the Hospodars, especially among the
Maurokordati, who rendered good service to their Roumanian subjects; but on
the whole the Phanariot rule was grasping, dishonest, and cruel. [355] Its
importance in relation to Greece was not that it Hellenised the Danubian
countries, for that it signally failed to do; but that it raised the
standard of Greek education, and enlarged the range of Greek thought, by
opening a political and administrative career to ambitious men. The
connection of the Phanariots with education was indeed an exceedingly close
one. Alexander Maurokordatos was the ardent and generous founder of schools
for the instruction of his countrymen in Constantinople as well as in other
cities, and for the improvement of the existing language of Greece. His
example was freely followed throughout the eighteenth century. It is,
indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of
wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the
culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and
Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded
by a striking revival of interest in the national language.

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