Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Greek intellectual movement in the eighteenth century.]

The knowledge of ancient Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood,
but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic
commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before
the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of
imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like
Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age
of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the
speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each
district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that
of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of
performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that
the Greek learnt to call himself Hellen, the name of his forefathers,
instead of Romaios, a Roman. As the new schools grew up and the old ones
were renovated or transformed, education ceased to be merely literary. In
the second half of the eighteenth century science returned in a humble form
to the land that had given it birth, and the range of instruction was
widened by men who had studied law, physics, and moral philosophy at
foreign Universities. Something of the liberal spirit of the inquirers of
Western Europe arose among the best Greek teachers. Though no attack was
made upon the doctrines of the Church, and no direct attack was made upon
the authority of the Sultan, the duty of religious toleration was
proclaimed in a land where bigotry had hitherto reigned supreme, and the
political freedom of ancient Greece was held up as a glorious ideal to a
less happy age. Some of the higher clergy and of the Phanariot instruments
of Turkish rule took fright at the independent spirit of the new learning,
and for a while it seemed as if the intellectual as well as the political
progress of Greece might be endangered by ecclesiastical ill-will. But the
attachment of the Greek people to the Church was so strong and so universal
that, although satire might be directed against the Bishops, a breach with
the Church formed no part of the design of any patriot. The antagonism
between episcopal and national feeling, strongest about the end of the
eighteenth century, declined during succeeding years, and had almost
disappeared before the outbreak of the war of liberation.

[Koraes, 1748-1833.]

[The language of Modern Greece.]

The greatest scholar of modern Greece was also one of its greatest
patriots. Koraes, known as the legislator of the Greek language, was born
in 1748, of Chian parents settled at Smyrna. The love of learning, combined
with an extreme independence of character, made residence insupportable to
him in a land where the Turk was always within sight, and where few
opportunities existed for gaining wide knowledge. His parents permitted him
to spend some years at Amsterdam, where a branch of their business was
established. Recalled to Smyrna at the age of thirty, Koraes almost
abandoned human society. The hand of a beautiful heiress could not tempt
him from the austere and solitary life of the scholar; and quitting his
home, he passed through the medical school of Montpellier, and settled at
Paris. He was here when the French Revolution began. The inspiration of
that time gave to his vast learning and inborn energy a directly patriotic
aim. For forty years Koraes pursued the work of serving Greece by the means
open to the scholar. The political writings in which he addressed the
Greeks themselves or appealed to foreigners in favour of Greece, admirable
as they are, do not form the basis of his fame. The peculiar task of Koraes
was to give to the reviving Greek nation the national literature and the
form of expression which every civilised people reckons among its most
cherished bonds of unity. Master, down to the minutest details, of the
entire range of Greek writings, and of the history of the Greek language
from classical times down to our own century, Koraes was able to select the
Hellenic authors, Christian as well as Pagan, whose works were best suited
for his countrymen in their actual condition, and to illustrate them as no
one could who had not himself been born and bred among Greeks. This was one
side of Koraes' literary task. The other was to direct the language of the
future Hellenic kingdom into its true course. Classical writing was still
understood by the educated in Greece, but the spoken language of the people
was something widely different. Turkish and Albanian influences had
barbarised the vocabulary; centuries of ignorance had given play to every
natural irregularity of local dialect. When the restoration of Greek
independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive
artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any
real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be
impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be
accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational
path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he
recommended that the forms of classical Greek, where they were not wholly
obsolete, should be fixed in the grammar of the language. While ridiculing
the attempt to restore modes of expression which, even in the written
language, had wholly passed out of use, he proposed to expunge all words
that were in fact not Greek at all, but foreign, and to replace them by
terms formed according to the natural laws of the language. The Greek,
therefore, which Koraes desired to see his countrymen recognise as their
language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek
of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements,
and methodised by a constant reference to a classical model, which,
however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory
has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been
recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made
Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in
familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in
schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to
that of classical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among
themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening Hellenic
civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. The political object of Koraes
has been completely attained. no people in Europe is now prouder of its
native tongue, or turns it to better account in education, than his
countrymen. In literature, the renovated language has still its work before
it. The lyric poetry that has been written in Greece since the time of
Koraes is not wanting, if a foreigner may express an opinion, in tenderness
and grace The writer who shall ennoble Greek prose with the energy and
directness of the ancient style has yet to arise [356]

[Development of Greek commerce, 1750-1820.]

[The Treaty of Kainardji, 1774.]

The intellectual advance of the Greeks in the eighteenth century was
closely connected with the development of their commerce, and this in its
turn was connected with events in the greater cycle of European history. A
period of comparative peace and order in the Levantine waters, following
the final expulsion of the Venetians from the Morea in 1718, gave play to
the natural aptitude of the Greek islanders for coasting-trade. Then ships,
still small and unfit to venture on long voyages, plied between the
harbours in the AEgaean and in the Black Sea, and brought profit to their
owners in spite of the imposition of burdens from which not only many of
the Mussulman subjects of the Sultan, but foreign nations protected by
commercial treaties, were free. It was at this epoch, after Venice had lost
its commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Russia began to
exercise a direct influence upon the fortunes of Greece. The Empress
Catherine had formed the design of conquering Constantinople, and intended,
under the title of Protectress of the Christian Church, to use the Greeks
as her allies. In the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey in
1768, a Russian expeditionary force landed in the Morea, and the Greeks
were persuaded to take up arms. The Moreotes themselves paid dearly for the
trust which they had placed in the orthodox Empress. They were virtually
abandoned to the vengeance of their oppressors; but to Greece at large the
conditions on which peace was made proved of immense benefit. The Treaty of
Kainardji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the express right to make
representations at Constantinople on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of
the Danubian provinces; it also bound the Sultan to observe certain
conditions in his treatment of the Greek islanders. Out of these clauses,
Russian diplomacy constructed a general right of interference on behalf of
any Christian subjects of the Porte. The Treaty also opened the Black Sea
to Russian ships of commerce, and conferred upon Russia the commercial
privileges of the most favoured nation. [357] The result of this compact
was a very remarkable one. The Russian Government permitted hundreds of
Greek shipowners to hoist its own flag, and so changed the footing of Greek
merchantmen in every port of the Ottoman Empire. The burdens which had
placed the Greek trader at a disadvantage, when compared with the
Mohammedan, vanished. A host of Russian consular agents, often Greeks
themselves, was scattered over the Levant. Eager for opportunities of
attaching the Greeks to their Russian patrons, quick to make their
newly-won power felt by the Turks, these men extracted a definite meaning
from the clauses of the Treaty of Kainardji, by which the Porte had bound
itself to observe the rights of its Christian subjects. The sense of
security in the course of their business, no less than the emancipation
from commercial fetters, gave an immense impulse to Greek traders. Their
ships were enlarged; voyages, hitherto limited to the Levant, were extended
to England and even to America; and a considerable armament of cannon was
placed on board each ship for defence against the attack of Algerian
pirates.

[Foundation of Odessa, 1792.]

[Death of Rhegas, 1798.]

[Influence of the French Revolutionon Greece.]

Before the end of the eighteenth century another war between Turkey and
Russia, resulting in the cession of the district of Oczakoff on the
northern shore of the Black Sea, made the Greeks both carriers and vendors
of the corn-export of Southern Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on
the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity
were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many
a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of L3,000 to be a
large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London
firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England
during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much
of the Mediterranean trade that was lost by France and its dependencies.
The increasing intelligence of the people was shown in the fact that
foreigners were no longer employed by Greek merchants as their travelling
agents in distant countries; there were countrymen enough of their own who
could negotiate with an Englishman or a Dane in his own language. The
richest Greeks were no doubt those of Odessa and Salonica, not of Hellas
proper; but even the little islands of Hydra and Spetza, the refuge of the
Moreotes whom Catherine had forsaken in 1770, now became communities of no
small wealth and spirit. Psara, which was purely Greek, formed with these
Albanian colonies the nucleus of an AEgaean naval Power. The Ottoman
Government, cowed by its recent defeats, and perhaps glad to see the means
of increasing its resources, made no attempt to check the growth of the
Hellenic armed marine. Under the very eyes of the Sultan, the Hydriote and
Psarian captains, men as venturesome as the sea-kings of ancient Greece,
accumulated the artillery which was hereafter to hold its own against many
an Ottoman man-of-war, and to sweep the Turkish merchantmen from the
AEgaean. Eighteen years before the Greek insurrection broke out, Koraes,
calling the attention of Western Europe to the progress made by his
country, wrote the following significant words:--"If the Ottoman Government
could have foreseen that the Greeks would create a merchant-navy, composed
of several hundred vessels, most of them regularly armed, it would have
crushed the movement at its commencement. It is impossible to calculate the
effects which may result from the creation of this marine, or the influence
which it may exert both upon the destiny of the oppressed nation and upon
that of its oppressors." [358] Like its classic sisterland in the
Mediterranean, Greece was stirred by the far-sounding voices of the French
Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the revival of a supposed
antique Republicanism, the victories of Hoche and Bonaparte, successively
kindled the enthusiasm of a race already restless under the Turkish yoke.
France drew to itself some of the hopes that had hitherto been fixed
entirely upon Russia. Images and ideas of classic freedom invaded the
domain where the Church had hitherto been all in all; the very sailors
began to call their boats by the names of Spartan and Athenian heroes, as
well as by those of saints and martyrs. In 1797 Venice fell, and Bonaparte
seized its Greek possessions, the Ionian Islands. There was something of
the forms of liberation in the establishment of French rule; the
inhabitants of Zante were at least permitted to make a bonfire of the
stately wigs worn by their Venetian masters. Great changes seemed to be
near at hand. It was not yet understood that France fought for empire, not
for justice; and the man who, above all others, represented the early
spirit of the revolution among the Greeks, the poet Rhegas, looked to
Bonaparte to give the signal for the rising of the whole of the Christian
populations subject to Mohammedan rule. Rhegas, if he was not a wise
politician, was a thoroughly brave man, and he was able to serve his
country as a martyr. While engaged in Austria in conspiracies against the
Sultan's Government, and probably in intrigues with Bernadotte, French
ambassador at Vienna, he was arrested by the agents of Thugut, and handed
over to the Turks. He was put to death at Belgrade, with five of his
companions, in May, 1798. The songs of Rhegas soon passed through every
household in Greece. They were a precious treasure to his countrymen, and
they have immortalised his name as a patriot. But the work which he had
begun languished for a time after his death. The series of events which
followed Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt extinguished the hope of the
liberation of Greece by the French Republic. Among the higher Greek clergy
the alliance with the godless followers of Voltaire was seen with no
favourable eye. The Porte was even able to find a Christian Patriarch to
set his name to a pastoral, warning the faithful against the sin of
rebellion, and reminding them that, while Satan was creating the Lutherans
and Calvinists, the infinite mercy of God had raised up the Ottoman Power
in order that the Orthodox Church might be preserved pure from the heresies
of the West. [359]

[The Ionian Islands. 1798-1815.]

[Ali Pasha, 1798-1821.]

From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by
the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali
Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was
deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the
coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under
the protection of the Czar and the Sultan. It was in the native
administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace
of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias,
whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter
the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and
conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall
of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest
Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant
rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives,
some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most
famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht
of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of
England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither
rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes,
vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian
Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought
at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his
violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow
alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's
court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers,
merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope
round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital.
[360] Among the officers of Ali's army there were some who were soon to be
the military rivals of Kolokotrones in the Greek insurrection: Ali's
physician, Dr. Kolettes, was gaining an experience and an influence among
these men which afterwards placed him at the head of the Government. For
good or for evil, it was felt that the establishment of a virtually
independent kingdom of Albania must deeply affect the fate of Greece; and
when at length Ali openly defied the Sultan, and Turkish armies closed
round his castle at Janina, the conflict between the Porte and its most
powerful vassal gave the Greeks the signal to strike for their own
independence.

[The Hetaeria Philike.]

The secret society, which under the name of Hetaeria Philike, or association
of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after
it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on
behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte. The founders of this society
were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn
more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from
those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of
the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire.
It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had
secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a
society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias
had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress
of Vienna, was in fact this political association in disguise. The real
chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the
instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by
scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a
general massacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they
wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the Hetaeria was
an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in
exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in
its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the
course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the
adjacent countries, had joined the association. The Turkish Government had
received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them
until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the
condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or
outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of
Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not
hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no
less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the
sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by
oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when
the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer
on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart,
that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.

[Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.]

Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs
of the Hetaeria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian
leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no
dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire
rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of
Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love
the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection
of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the Hetaeria besought him to place
himself at its head. Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man
the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from assisting
Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year
recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all
personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece
better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous
enterprise. He rejected the offers of the Hetaerists, who then turned to a
soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander
Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as
Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the
designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to
attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to
believe that if Greece once rose in arms the assistance of Russia could not
long be withheld. [361] Hypsilanti, sacrificing his hopes of the recovery
of a great private fortune through the intercession of the Czar at
Constantinople, placed himself at the head of the Hetaeria, and entered upon
a career, for which, with the exception of personal courage proved in the
campaigns against Napoleon, he seems to have possessed no single
qualification.

[The Heraerist plan.]

In October, 1820, the leading Hetaerists met in council at Ismail to decide
whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or
in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of
Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the
exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish
soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty
of Bucharest to send no troops into the Principalities without the Czar's
consent. It does not appear that the Hetaerists had yet formed any
calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had
certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks,
or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne.
The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided
that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus.
Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him,
reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia.
[362] And now for the first time some account was taken of the Roumanian
population. It was known that the mass of the people groaned under the
feudal oppression of the Boyards, or landowners, and that the Boyards
themselves detested the government of the Greek Hospodars. A plan found
favour among Hypsilanti's advisers that the Wallachian peasantry should
first be called to arms by a native leader for the redress of their own
grievances, and that the Greeks should then step in and take control of the
insurrectionary movement. Theodor Wladimiresco, a Roumanian who had served
in the Russian army, was ready to raise the standard of revolt among his
countrymen. It did not occur to the Hetaerists that Wladimiresco might have
a purpose of his own, or that the Roumanian population might prefer to see
the Greek adventure fail. No sovereign by divine right had a firmer belief
in his prerogative within his own dominions than Hypsilanti in his power to
command or outwit Roumanians, Slavs, and all other Christian subjects of
the Sultan.

[Hypsilanti in Roumania March, 1821.]

The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821,
while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed
the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon
Bucharest. On the 16th of March the Hetaerists began their own insurrection
by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a
conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let
loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down.
Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Jassy with a few
hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called
upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great
European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos,
the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and
supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men,
some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Jassy. The roads
to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his
disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he
might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing
on the north of the Danube.

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